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“California’s record-breaking 2020 wildfire season hit another grim milestone on Monday, with officials saying that fires have burned more than 3 million acres so far this year.” CBS SF Bay Area
The right blames the fires primarily on poor forest management.
“Newsom is right that climate plays a part. It does create a more favorable fire environment by increasing hot and dry conditions. But… The much more important factor is the way we manage forest lands and develop our landscape…
“This past decade, California has seen an average burnt area of 775,000 acres. Before 1800, however, California typically saw between 4.4 and 11.9 million acres burn every year… Even this year’s record-breaking 2.3 million burnt acres is about half the lower end of a typical year in earlier times. And the main reason we are now seeing more and bigger fires is because our century of fire suppression has left what researchers call a ‘fire deficit’ — all the fuel that should have burnt but didn’t. It is now waiting to burn even hotter and fiercer… Putting up solar panels and using biofuels will be costly but do virtually nothing to fix this problem.”
Bjorn Lomborg, New York Post
“If controlled burns are so effective and so self-evidently needed, why has California done so little of it? One factor is a familiar and frustrating story: ‘not in my backyard.’ Homeowners don’t like the smoke and the charred, barren landscape afterwards. They either explicitly or implicitly believe that a fire can forever be put off until later. Another factor is liability, as no one wants to start a controlled burn, have something go wrong, and get sued. The legal structure sets up all of the incentives to not perform a controlled burn…
“And a third factor is environmentalists’ suspicion that efforts to reduce the amount of combustible fuel in forests are some sort of Trojan horse for corporations that wish to exploit natural resources… A lot of people who say they love nature don’t really understand nature, and they can’t be bothered to learn about how nature actually works. They envision nature as a Disney-fied image of all creatures living happily and in harmony, and not the recognition that the death and decay of some living creatures is what allows other living creatures to survive, grow, and thrive.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“I’m a seventh-generation Oregonian… For years, we’ve suffered from misguided priorities and dramatic failures of leadership. Now, the bill is coming due… Under an 80-year-old contract, responsibility for most forest lands falls to the state. The understanding is that the state’s sustainable harvesting and replanting of timber on these lands would provide long-term income for rural counties…
“But in recent decades, political power in Oregon has accumulated in urban Portland and its surrounding suburbs. Residents of these areas — insulated from the dangers of land mismanagement — have insisted on preserving the forests as untouchable playgrounds. Since 2001, the state has overprioritized recreation and environmentalist concerns such as ecotourism. As a result, Oregon’s forests were allowed to become overgrown, creating fire hazards. The state has screwed up so badly that, in November last year, it was ordered by a jury to pay Oregon’s rural counties $1.1 billion for failing to uphold its contractual obligations for responsible forest management.”
Julie Parrish, Washington Post
Similarly, “California has been hot and arid since antiquity, and although climate change has exacerbated some heat waves, the rolling blackouts and wildfires plaguing the state are a result of the failures of public policy more than anything. Acts of God have and always will continue to happen, but policy decisions to cut off carbon-neutral energy sources and let the state's greenery dry out to become fodder for fires are calculated choices…
“California's energy crisis is far more politically untenable, with Newsom a proponent of shutting down the state's entire nuclear energy grid back when he was still lieutenant governor. The anti-nuclear lobby has entirely won the favor of California Democrats, putting the state's only carbon-neutral energy form with the fortitude to power the entire state on the path of imminent extinction.”
Tiana Lowe, Washington Examiner
“Nuclear power produces no carbon emissions, meaning it has the potential to help with global warming. Nuclear powerplants are small but potent, freeing up land for wilderness and parks. Will electric cars become more popular? We’ll need clean electricity to power those cars. Nuclear powerplants are clean and safe. Nuclear power’s known total worldwide death toll since it was first initiated is about 100. This includes Chernobyl. Contrast that with the estimated 1.6 million people who died prematurely as a result of indoor air pollution in 2017 because of a lack of good electrical power…
“[There is also] the promise of geoengineering. We had a natural experiment in 1991 when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted and discharged over twenty million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. The haze caused the earth to cool by about 0.5 degrees Celsius. That raises an immediate thought: could we put more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere on purpose and have a permanent ‘Mount Pinatubo effect’? Nathan Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft and now of Intellectual Ventures, thinks it might be feasible…
“The details are laid out in Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book SuperFreakonomics… the authors note that Paul J. Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry and was famous for alerting us about the ozone hole, thinks that this could work.”
David R. Henderson, Hoover Institution
The left blames the fires primarily on the effects of climate change.
The left blames the fires primarily on the effects of climate change.
“I understand it is difficult to focus on a slow-moving crisis such as climate change with so many immediate crises — the covid-19 pandemic, the economic meltdown, the protests over systemic racism — dominating the headlines and buffeting our lives. But the urgent cannot be allowed to obscure the existential. Our sky is not supposed to look Martian. Hurricanes and tropical storms are supposed to come one or two at a time, not in platoons… All of these ‘natural’ disasters were foreseen decades ago by scientists who warned of the unnatural consequences of releasing massive quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere…
“They told us the West would become warmer, drier and more susceptible to fire. They told us that tropical storms would become less predictable and more frequent, and that rising sea levels would put coastal cities at greater risk. And they told us that if we don't take coordinated global action to limit carbon emissions, these life-threatening impacts will get much, much worse… America, and the world, desperately need a president of the United States who fully acknowledges the crisis and chooses to address it.”
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post
“It’s hard to argue that there has ever been a president more committed to exacerbating climate change than this one. The steps Trump has taken to do that are almost too numerous to mention, from pulling out of the Paris climate agreement to appointing a coal lobbyist to run the Environmental Protection Agency to letting energy companies release more methane into the air to rolling back regulations on emissions from power plants to encouraging car companies to produce gas guzzlers…
“Meanwhile, this is one area where Biden has genuinely moved to the left over the past year. In July he released an updated climate plan, one that proposed moving to 100 percent clean energy by 2035 and net zero emissions for the country by 2050, spending $2 trillion over four years on green infrastructure and aggressively addressing decades of inequity in which low-income and minority communities bore the worst burden of pollution.”
Paul Waldman, Washington Post
“Yes, California and other Western states could be doing a lot more to make forests more resilient to wildfires. But as Gov. Gavin Newsom pointed out, the federal government owns 57% of the forest land in California. The state owns just 3% and the rest is in private hands. Despite that lopsided ownership ratio, California spends five to six times more than the federal government does on fires and forestry in the state, according to a briefing Newsom gave to Trump. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spent $3 billion in 2018 on fire management. The U.S. Forest service budgeted $500 million for the state…
“So, yes, there does need to be a lot more forest management done — by the federal government, in partnership with the states and private land owners… Trump can talk about more effective forest management as much as he wants. It will come to pass only if he works with Congress to budget a lot more money for the U.S. Forest Service.”
Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times
“In the mouths of climate skeptics, or Donald Trump, blaming forest management can sound like an evasion, which it is — over recent decades, climate change has extended wildfire season by two months, quintupled the amount of flammable forest, and driven a doubling, at least, of acreage burned… But one reason ‘forest management’ sounds like an evasion is because it also sounds doable — small, manageable, marginal, a matter of ‘clearing brush’…
“In fact, the need for what’s called ‘controlled burning,’ to thin the state’s supply of ‘fuel’ without risking damage to life or property, is so large it would dwarf anything humans have ever seen before. In January, a team of scientists offered an authoritative estimate for how much of the state would have to be burned under human supervision to stabilize its fire ecology: 20 million acres… it would mean burning approximately one-fifth of the state — an area about the size of Maine…
“[California’s population] is 40 million, almost all of them living in communities defined by much more sprawl into what is called, not just by scientists but also by locals, the ‘wildland-urban interface.’ If you are rooting for a return to a truly ‘natural’ fire regime in the state, you are rooting against almost everything that is life in California today.”
David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine
“The science fiction writer William Gibson once observed, ‘The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.’ One might say the same for climate change: It is already here, but not evenly distributed. In the United States, the areas that are suffering the most immediate problems are coastal states, which are dealing with not just the fires of the West Coast but also hurricanes and rising sea levels. These coastal states tend to be Democratic or swing states. The Republican Party dominates the inland states, where climate change is a more distant problem…
“This means it’s unlikely that there will be any bipartisan consensus to deal with climate for years to come, by which time action might be too late… The usual arguments against the Electoral College and the filibuster are small-d democratic in nature. These are mechanisms that block majority rule. That’s true enough. But the push against them now includes an environmental dimension. In a normal period the United States managed to survive with these anti-democratic mechanisms, but climate change is too big an existential threat to allow them to continue.”
Jeet Heer, The Nation
