“All these things are interconnected. This is a difficult time. But we’ve met the challenge.”
It was California Governor Gavin Newsom back in 2020 when he was busy blaming “climate change” for the forest fires that erupted that year.
“I literally don’t have patience for climate change deniers,” he said.
Four years later, Newsom again blames “climate change” for the devastating fires in Los Angeles.
But wait. If climate change is really to blame, why was California so obvious, so miserable, so unforgivably unprepared?
Someone has to ask Newsom why the state didn’t spend the past four years aggressively cleaning the brush to minimize the chances of a catastrophic wildfire. Why were large and effective buffer zones not carved out so that fires could not reach populated areas? Why, on a Marshall Plan scale, efforts were not made to build reservoirs so that firefighters could get water from hydrants?
It’s not as if the country doesn’t have a lot of warnings. For decades, environmentalists have been screaming about how “climate change” is making wildfires more frequent, all-encompassing and deadly.
But it was in this situation, when environmentalists have all the levers of power, that they dawned and delayed, let bureaucratic bureaucracy and environmental groups halt efforts to prepare for the worst and put other ridiculous and hugely expensive projects (such as the “bullet” train) at the head of the line.
And in the process, California has wasted fantastic sums of money.
In 2018, former Governor Jerry Brown signed a $1 billion bill that was supposed to “prevent catastrophic wildfires and protect Californians.” Where did this money go?
A 2019 report by Newsom’s “strike forces” of wildfires said that “over the next five years, the state will allocate more than $1 billion for critical fuel reduction projects to support designated fire crews, forest thinning and other forest health projects.”
Early in his term, Newsom launched a California flora processing program that was touted as a plan to speed up environmental reviews of forest management projects.
But as the Washington Examiner shows in a devastating review of waste and mismanagement:
These types of projects — such as thinning dense tree clusters and burns designed to eliminate the conditions necessary for the rapid spread of fires — have also been stifled by climate groups that regularly challenge them in court.
A free beacon review of the latest data from the program found that of the 525 approved projects covering 666,450 acres, only 231 projects covering only 6,000 acres have been completed. Only two projects are located in the Los Angeles metro area, which covers 130 acres, — a fuel reduction project proposed by the Los Angeles County Fire Department and a nonprofit catchment area project — but both remain incomplete.
Newsom is hardly innocent. A report three years ago found that he lied about his forest fire prevention efforts.
An investigation by CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found that the governor had misrepresented his accomplishments and even invested in wildfire prevention. The investigation found that Newsom overestimated by an astonishing 690% the number of acres treated with fuel outages and foreseen burns in highly forestry projects, which he said had to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. Newsom has argued that the 35 “priority projects” carried out as a result of his executive order led to fire prevention work on 90,000 acres. But the country’s own data shows that the actual number is 11, 399.
We now learn that he reduced funding for forest fires and forest resilience by $101 million in a budget approved last June, as well as millions from other programs designed to mitigate fires. Is that what Newsom meant when he said in 2019 that he “has made forest fire prevention and mitigation a top priority since taking office”?
Newsom has been equally lacking in building new reservoirs, which one would think work No. 1 is convinced that “climate change” will cause more droughts and wildfires.
In 2014, Californians overwhelmingly approved a $7.5 billion water bond proposal, of which nearly $3 billion was allocated for the construction of new reservoirs. More than a decade later, not a single new reservoir has been built. Where has all this money gone?
To be clear, we are not buying the one who is to blame for climate change.
As we noted last week, there is no evidence that wildfires have become more common or deadly, despite constant claims to the contrary. (See: “Fire, snow, and climate storm.”)
But Newsom and the rest of the left-wing Democrats who run the country do so. This is their religion.
Every time something bad happens in the country, they blame fossil fuels. They endlessly warn that it is necessary to react quickly.
And yet they have done almost nothing to protect their inhabitants from what they repeatedly say is an existential crisis.
In their own words, they have convicted themselves of criminal negligence.
