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Blame Newsom, Not Climate Change, for Los Angeles Wildfires
With the Los Angeles wildfires having killed at least 24 people and destroyed over 10,0000 structures, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is racing to control the narrative. Anyone who blames Democrats for the out-of-control wildfires is peddling “misinformation,” he now suggests.
To propagate that idea, the governor launched a new website over the weekend, “California Fire Facts,” which provides what he says is “The TRUTH.” In a post on X, Newsom said that “The TRUTH” includes the claim that “CA has INCREASED forest management ten-fold since we took office.”
As the fact-checkers say, context is needed here.
While forest management for the prevention of wildfires, including selective thinning and controlled burning, has increased under Newsom, it has fallen well, well short of what the governor has promised. On top of that, the governor has deceived citizens as to the extent his administration has performed wildfire prevention activities.
On Newsom’s first full day in office as governor of California, on Jan. 8, 2019, Newsom held a press conference in which he declared war on the state’s wildfires and said that the state’s approach to combatting them “fundamentally has to change.” The following year, he signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Forest Service in which he pledged to “sustainably treat 500,000 acres” of forests and wildlands annually by 2025.
That strategy is right-on. Research has consistently demonstrated that such treatments, which include “thinning in excessively dense stands, timber harvesting, mechanical fuel reduction, prescribed fire, [and] grazing,” reduce the threat of wildfires. For example, a study by the University of California, Berkeley, published in 2023, found: “[D]ifferent forest management techniques — prescribed burning, restoration thinning or a combination of both — are effective at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire in California.”
The problem is that Newsom has wildly failed to reach that goal. Cal Fire, California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, claims that it treated 103,506 acres in fiscal year 2019-20, 116,668 acres in fiscal year 2020-21, 101,548 acres in fiscal year 2021-22, 91,601 acres in fiscal year 2022-2023, and 131,034 acres in fiscal year 2023-24.
However, a 2021 investigation by NPR California and CapRadio cast doubt on the extent of the forest management claimed by Newsom. Whereas Newsom said in a 2020 press release that wildfire prevention projects had “treated 90,000 acres” in 2019, the investigation found that the true total was 11,399 acres, as the state had claimed credit for the overall project areas as opposed to the acreage that was actually treated. For example, one project that treated 734 acres was counted as treatment on 26,541 acres, as that was the “original project area.” In response to the investigation, the head of Cal Fire apologized and acknowledged that the state’s figures were inaccurate.
This is made even worse by the fact that only a portion of Cal Fire’s claimed treatments involve the most effective means of fire prevention, “fuels reduction” and “prescribed fire.” For example, in fiscal year 2021-22, Cal Fire says 24,625 acres were treated with these methods. In 2021, Newsom promised to increase those subsets of forest management to 100,000 acres by 2025.
A 2022 investigation by The California Newsroom (which includes CalMatters, CapRadio, KCRW, KQED, KPBS, LAist, and NPR) pinpointed some of the reasons for the state’s failure to reach its wildfire prevention goals. They included “stagnant” hiring for forest management; an inability to track wildfire prevention projects; and a failure to certify sufficient “burn bosses.”
The Folly of Environmental Protection
Another central reason for Newsom’s failure to reach California’s wildfire prevention goals is the state’s environmental protection policies. These policies have long required years of scrutiny to approve forest management actions. In several documented instances, California towns have even burned down when wildfire prevention projects in their areas were in environmental review.
In the name of combatting this problem and fast-tracking environmental review, Newsom launched the California Vegetation Treatment Program. At the time of the project’s 2019 certification, Newsom called it “a long-term solution to increase the pace and scale of critical vegetation treatment.”
Though it was billed as a more efficient environmental review process, the program has been anything but. The California Newsroom found that the program was “even more burdensome” than the preexisting environmental review program. As a result, two years after the implementation of the program, not a single wildfire prevention project had been completed under it. In contrast, the state’s Board of Forestry had claimed that 250,000 acres would be treated annually via the California Vegetation Treatment Program by 2024. The problem, concluded The California Newsroom, was mismanagement rather than funding, given the $1.5 billion spent on wildfire prevention in California in 2021 alone.
Environmental protection proved to be a blockade to wildfire prevention in the Topanga Canyon, adjacent to the Palisades. As recounted this week in the Wall Street Journal, after the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power replaced wooden utility poles and widened a fire-access road in the Topanga Canyon in 2019, the California Coastal Commission fined the department $2 million because it had removed a couple hundred Braunton’s milkvetch plants during the course of the project.
Debunking the Myth That Climate Change Is to Blame
Many have claimed that climate change is to blame for the disastrous and deadly wildfires in Los Angeles. For instance, a headline in Time magazine last week read: “L.A. Fires Show the Reality of Living in a World with 1.5°C of Warming.”
In reality, it is impossible to conclude that one wildfire event was caused by climate change when wildfires are a natural and recurring part of the region’s ecosystem.
Moreover, wildfires have actually decreased in recent decades. While there were close to 14,000 wildfires in California in 1987, that number has fallen below 8,000 in recent years. The downward trend has been consistent over time.
However, even as the number of wildfires in California has decreased, the acreage burned has increased. Jonathan A. Lesser, a senior fellow with the National Center for Energy Analytics, explained that discrepancy in City Journal last week: “[I]nstead of removing dead and diseased trees and undergrowth, the state, following environmentalist restrictions, has allowed that natural fuel to build up, creating the conditions for explosive wildfires.”
Essentially, wildfires today are more severe because of the unnaturally high levels of forest density and undergrowth.
Here’s just one example of where policies intended to protect the environment came back to do more harm than good. California had a program to create protected habitats for spotted owls, but the unnatural “buildup of explosive vegetation” ended up causing greater destruction by fueling wildfires that hit those areas. The author of a study documenting the unintended result told the Los Angeles Times: “The places that we’re trying to protect are now more difficult to protect because we’ve been protecting them.”
Climate change is to blame for the worsening wildfires only insofar as it is the boogeyman California liberals invoke to justify their environmental review programs that stymie proper forest management.
*****
Gavin Newsom claims to support the scientifically proven methods for reducing wildfire threats: prescribed burns and fuel reduction. And yet, the way he has governed — particularly through the botched California Vegetation Treatment Program — suggests a deeper allegiance to the environmentalists who oppose intervention, all in some misguided perception that any human impact is inherently harmful to the planet.
It’s time for Newsom to focus on real environmental issues and actually treat 500,000 acres a year as promised.
READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes:
Who Are the Potential Replacements for 88-Year-Old Pope Francis?
Biden’s Bizarre Confession Should Infuriate Democrats
Media Fawns Over Spiritual Guru Shaping New Age Thought
Ellie Gardey Holmes is the author of Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power.
The post Blame Newsom, Not Climate Change, for Los Angeles Wildfires appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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