California Wildfires, Hurricanes, and Biden

California Wildfires, Hurricanes, and Biden

California has had massive wildfires for millennia. Hurricanes have been pummeling our Gulf and Atlantic coasts for just as long. Scientists of all political persuasions agree.

But Green New Deal politicians and their sock puppet, Joe Biden, are taking Rahm Emanuel’s advice to “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” For those espousing a massive government takeover of the economy, California’s wildfires and Gulf hurricanes came just in time for them to pound on their climate change drum.

Start with the wildfires. This year’s tragedy was the result of four factors: years of forest mismanagement, people moving into known fire-prone areas, a hot, dry summer and lightning.

Danish environmental guru Bjorn Lomborg has been included in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world and is one of the liberal UK Guardian’s 50 people who could save the planet. Commenting on the wildfires, Lomborg writes:

“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.”

The New York Times got off its climate change high horse long enough to acknowledge California’s poor choices:

“Millions of Americans are moving into wildfire-prone areas outside of cities, and communities often resist restrictions on development. A century of federal policy to aggressively extinguish all wildfires rather than letting some burn at low levels, an approach now seen as misguided, has left forests with plenty of fuel for especially destructive blazes.”

Periodic controlled burns or manual clearing of fire-prone brush and grass is the obvious answer. But once folks have moved into these beautiful but fire-prone areas, they don’t want a bare or charred vista for the several years it will take nature to revegetate.

Further, the environmental left often opposes removing brush and forest undergrowth, seeing it as a precursor to future corporate exploitation of public forest lands.

Despite this opposition, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom recognizes the need for better forestry. After last year’s wildfires, he agreed with the federal government to reduce fire risks on a million acres a year of dry forest tinder for five years.

During a meeting with Pres. Trump in September, Newsom told him, “I want to thank you for supporting that effort.” He went on to say, “There’s no question” that “we have not done justice on our forest management.”

Turn now to hurricanes.

A 2018 paper in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society documented the fact that hurricanes hitting the U.S. have not increased in either frequency or intensity since 1900.

Likewise, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in 2018 that “it is premature to conclude that human activities—and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming—have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.”

So how does candidate Biden assess wildfire and hurricane science? When your only tool is the climate change hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

At his news conference after inspecting California’s wildfire damage, he claimed greenhouse gases are responsible for both wildfires and hurricanes, failing even to mention what Gov. Newsom said about forest management. Ignoring the science, Biden’s words were nothing but exaggeration and hyperbole:

“What we’re seeing in America—in our communities—is connected to [climate change]. With every bout with nature’s fury, caused by our own inaction on climate change, more Americans see and feel the devastation, whether in big cities, small towns, on coastlines or in farmlands. It is happening everywhere. It is happening now.”

He spoke straight from his teleprompter, reading text written by his Sandernista campaign policy staff and ignoring the common sense shown by both the New York Times and Gov. Newsom in assessing the proximate causes of California’s wildfire disaster.

Newsom and Trump agreed not to agree on broader climate policy. But I give Newsom credit for acknowledging the need for improved forest management and for working constructively with Trump on that issue. In contrast, Biden somehow seems to think solar panels and biofuels will solve the problem.

Whether you like Trump as a person or not, score another one for his administration’s policy.

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