Crossing the Threshold
At the conservative California Policy Center, Edward Ring, director of water and energy policy, says the LA fires have gotten out of hand “largely due to poor land management.”
The horrific destruction is multifaceted, and the Santa Ana winds that blow from the east have little to do with climate change. The cause of the fires and the reasons why they’ve been so destructive, however, are multi-faceted.
Santa Ana Winds Part of LA Mythology.
The state needs to send more water south, and because it hasn’t, Southern California operates on what could be described as “a just-in-time water system. They don’t have the pumps and pipes necessary to deliver surges of water to these mountain neighborhoods and these foothill neighborhoods.
“Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed” before it would be sparked by lightning strikes,” said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land’s oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
A Just-in-Time Water System
Although mainstream media outlets have largely dismissed Trump’s concerns as mostly noise that has little to do with fighting the fires, Ring is correct, “Trump isn’t necessarily wrong,” writes Ryan Mills in NRO:
The state does need to send more water south, and because it hasn’t, Southern California operates on what could be described as “a just-in-time water system.” There aren’t enough pumps and pipes necessary to deliver surges of water to these mountain neighborhoods and these foothill neighborhoods.”
Thanks to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists, the result is that the L.A. foothills were primed to burn, argues Mr. Ring:
“If those things had been done, or were being done regularly, you’re still going to get fires in Los Angeles if something happens with the wind and a spark. … But you’re not going to get something like this horrible disaster that we’re dealing with now, because there just wouldn’t be as much fuel.”
It is hard not to criticize the Los Angeles County Fire Department leaders for shipping surplus firefighting gear to Ukraine in 2022. Or allegedly prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion over technological innovations and enhancing community resilience.
To many on the left, there is only one real culprit for the fires: climate change, criticizes Mr. Ring:
They (California) don’t have the pumps and pipes necessary to deliver surges of water to these mountain neighborhoods and these foothill neighborhoods.
Lacking Land Management
Mr. Ring reiterates the unintended causes of the lack of land management in the L.A Basin. Ring places the blame on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Californians and state leaders need to seriously grapple with the reality that they’ve built big cities and dense communities in a region prone to fire.
Toxic Arguments vs Solutions
Marc Joffe, a policy analyst and fellow with the California Policy Center, said he’s frustrated by people who argue the fires are “because of climate change.
We’ve got to fight climate change because we’re having more and more of these horrible events,” which he calls a “toxic” argument that doesn’t allow for actionable, in-the-moment solutions.
There is absolutely nothing that California politicians can do to meaningfully impact the rate at which the climate is warming,” adding that in the meantime wildfires are happening and “they will continue to happen.
In addition to deregulating land management, Ring said state leaders need to prioritize burying powerlines, which are often the source of fires. Instead of spending money on renewables, he argues, state leaders could spend that money on undergrounding powerlines in fire-prone neighborhoods.
Building a more robust water infrastructure would also be worthwhile, though Ring notes how impossible it is to “drown a fire as big and powerful as the biggest L.A. blazes.”
Hardening homes and developing an energy system where power can be more easily rerouted would be valuable. One reason some L.A. fire hydrants were dry this week was that power was cut to some water pumps.
A “bunch of stuff” is needed. “Simply building up fire departments to respond when massive fires break out in densely-populated areas won’t cut it.”
We can’t just rely on emergency response … We’ve crossed that threshold.
Ryan Mills continues: in 2020, the Creek Fire threatened Big Creek Canyon, north of Fresno.
Shaver Lake was directly in the fire’s path that September, the village and the forest surrounding the lake were mostly spared from its wrath.
Land and fire experts say they know why: For decades, leaders with the utility responsible for maintaining the forest have been actively engaged in what is called “total-ecosystem management” — they remove dead trees and set small, prescribed burns to thin the ground cover, greatly reducing the fuel available for mega-scorchers like the Creek Fire.
Another example of blatantly crossing the threshold:
The Endangered Species Act (ESA), rather than doing a good job at conserving endangered species, does a good job at providing environmental activists with a powerful tool to block construction projects environmentalists don’t like. ESA is a tool activists use: if you can invent an endangered species, you can stop just about any major project you want, explains Dominic Pino, also in NRO.
Mr. Pino, what constitutes an “endangered species?” And how do activists abuse the ESA?
Inherently it’s a judgment call, – one that courts are likely to defer to scientists on, since judges don’t usually know much about biology, zoology, or ecology,
So, if you’re an environmentalist who wants to stop a project, send some scientists out to the area the project is taking place and try to find some species that could be considered endangered. If they can find one, the project has to stop under the ESA.
So, Mr. Pino, tell us about the snail darter. How do you explain the darter?
Well, dear reader, Mr. Pino will debrief you: “Technically, there is no snail darter,” according to Thomas Near, a Yale fish biology professor quoted by the Times.
We now know this to be the case because in 2015, fish that looked like snail darters were found in a river hundreds of miles away from the Little Tennessee River. DNA analysis confirmed that the “snail darter” was in fact the eastern population of this other type of fish, the stargazing darter, which is not endangered.
Mr. Pino continues, … the ESA is but one of many laws passed in the early 1970s that have contributed to the proliferation of growth-stifling federal regulations that today cost the U.S. economy over $2 trillion per year.
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