Thunder shattered the evening quiet and lightning lit up the sky outside my office. I stayed at my computer feeling secure that the surge protector would manage the extra load. Suddenly my screen lit up with a strange message:

Speaker Pelosi:

This is Mother Earth and you’ve defamed me, something I will not tolerate. This week you said, 

“Mother earth is angry. She’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is… the climate crisis is real and has an impact.”

How dare you speak in my name? How dare you defame me to deflect from the miscalculations and loony policies of your California Democrat colleagues?

In ancient times I was known as the Goddess of Fresh Water and Fertility.

I gave California plenty of water to nourish the land and people, I gave you rain, but you threw it away, letting it drain into the sea instead of capturing it and treating it. Not only would you have lots of water if you did this, but you’d save money and electricity costs of pumping the water in from other states. What dams you do have, you let deteriorate so they pose an extreme hazard to those living near them, and you  have not built adequate water storage facilities.  Victor Davis Hanson, a true friend of mine, lays it out clearly. 

Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental movement would one day go to court to stop most new dam construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reservoir on the Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temperance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Aw Paw reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored 15 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for 30 years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just as difficult to imagine that environmentalists would try to divert contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities.[snip] The Green dream was not simply river restoration and beautification, however. Bay Area environmentalists also believed that vastly increased freshwater inflows would help oxygenate the San Francisco Delta, thereby enabling the survival of the Delta smelt, a three-inch baitfish, while ensuring that salmon could be reintroduced into the San Joaquin River watershed.

Ah yes, the delta smelt must be saved, even if the earth dies and the people on it must starve or flee to better-managed places.

You let rich donors and green nitwits destroy what I gave you, picking a species here and there to “save” at the cost of human lives and welfare, and you are very selective about it.

While ignoring the high energy demands of aluminum and glass production, you covered the land in solar collectors, unconcerned about the amount of water needed to keep them functioning: 1200 million gallons of water a year for just two of California’s solar power generating facilities.  Nor have you considered the cost to bird life -- 6,000 birds a year are fried in midair over just one of your plants in the Mojave Desert. 

And then there are the bird-pâté-creating wind farms. The Altamont wind farm in your state  alone has killed tens of thousands of birds since put into operation.

So save the Delta smelt, but ignore the kestrels and bald eagles? Like everything else I, Mother Nature, gave you, you have mismanaged it, responding instead to the rich but dumb donors who replenish the coffers of your “green” supporters and those who hope to profit from government-sponsored projects which promise far more than they deliver, while underplaying the costs to consumers and to the earth itself.

You let your forests get overgrown so they cannot help conserve water supply. The overgrown forests reduce forest supply, preventing water from seeping down into groundwater aquifers and reservoirs. In fact, it is  you and your Democrat colleagues -- not climate change -- that harm the forests I gave you.

I gave you lush forests to provide you and all animal life with shelter. What did you do? You managed it badly, refusing to clear the undergrowth. You blocked timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns, leaving the forests with an excess of dried biomass so every lightning strike creates a danger of vast fires. You turned the hillsides and canyons of Southern California into tinderboxes and now from San Diego to Seattle the skies are dark with soot from forest fires that need not have been so disastrous. Doubt me? You shouldn’t. 

"The U.S. Forest Service used to be a profitable federal agency,” McClintock told Grimes.

Up until the mid-1970s, we managed our national forests according to well-established and time-tested forest management practices. But 40 years ago, we replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect. Ponderous, Byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to save the environment. The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts and our federal agencies ever since.

But these zealots have not protected the forests. They have destroyed them. The consequences are far-reaching.

Did you or Governor Newsom look at the North American fire map? James Woods did and asks why does "climate change" stop at the Canadian border? I gave you  ample supplies of oil and natural gas which you’ve done everything possible to refuse, instead stupidly buying electricity from elsewhere and pretending that solar energy and windmills will supply the difference though, of course, they cannot. (I must say with the electrical grid now holding on with a wing and a prayer and rolling blackouts  I’m laughing at folks who cannot fuel up their electric cars. Like Iowahawk, I suppose they can cut just cut holes in their floorboards and peddle along by foot like a Fred Flintstone car.  Oowners who doubtless fought to close the very clean San Onofre nuclear power generating station to save the planet while using electricity provided from outside the state produced by the very fossil fuels you abjure.)

Don’t  imagine  I’ll venture into a California courtroom to sue you for defamation. I have other plans.

Mother Earth