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December 10, 2017

Jerry Brown blames everyone but himself for California wildfires

By Monica Showalter

Jerry Brown is at it again.

Blaming Californians for the devastating series of California wildfires month, he went Full Moonbeam and declared the problem a function of global warming, calling it a new normal about which nothing is to be done.

As if wildfires that sweep away homes in California's unique Mediteranean microclimates have never happened before this past week.

Compare and contrast to President Trump's gracious tweet on the matter, which was the classy thing to say:

 

 

Brown has never been about showing class. The Daily Mail reports:

Governor Jerry Brown on Saturday toured Ventura County neighborhoods ravaged by a weeklong wildfire that killed at least one person and destroyed hundreds of homes and other buildings.

At a news conference, the Democrat said drought and climate change mean California faces a 'new reality' where lives and property are continually threatened by fire, at a cost of billions of dollars.

He added that gusty winds and low humidity are continuing and warned that there's a good chance of seeing 'firefighting at Christmas'.

He said it will take 'heroic' efforts in the US and abroad to stem climate change and urged US lawmakers to pay more attention to dealing with natural disasters such as fires, floods and earthquakes.


It's just a smokescreen for his failure to do anything about California's water situation and his greenie allies' failure to allow sensible evironmental policies that take the natural features of the state into account.
 
Plenty of research has been done about this. The Daily Signal has found several studies showing that it's federal all-encompassing environmental policies that have the most to do with this, disallowing forestry officials to clear brush for one thing among many. Brown's a big fan of federal over local control.
 

In a May congressional hearing, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., said, “Forty-five years ago, we began imposing laws that have made the management of our forests all but impossible.”

He went on to say that federal authorities have done a poor job of implementing methods to reduce the number of deadly fires, and that this has been devastating for America’s wildlands.

“Time and again, we see vivid boundaries between the young, healthy, growing forests managed by state, local, and private landholders, and the choked, dying, or burned federal forests,” McClintock said. “The laws of the past 45 years have not only failed to protect the forest environment—they have done immeasurable harm to our forests.”

In a recent House address, McClintock pinned the blame of poor forest management on bad 1970s laws, like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. He said these laws “have resulted in endlessly time-consuming and cost-prohibitive restrictions and requirements that have made the scientific management of our forests virtually impossible.”

 
There's also Brown's failure to stockpile water after all the rains from last winter's huge storms, something that could have prevented the areas around population centers from becoming bone dry and easy to burn. Brown did nothing to retrieve that gift from nature, he just let the vegetation that came from it to dry up and catch fire in the low humidity and high winds.
 
There is also the state's failure to permit the building of new housing, driving housing settlements further and further into the wilderness where they are more vulnerable to fires and have fewer big-city resources to immediately fight them. Bonsall and Santa Clarita are perfect examples of this.
 
And finally there is Brown's tone-deaf arrogance in his appalling statements full of naysaying fatalism as first responders fight the hellfires with all they've got to save people's homes. Brown's idiotic statements would suggest there is no point in trying since the fires are some sort of new normal.'
 
He sounds like London's mayor, who told Londoners to just get used to terrorism as 'part and parcel' to life in the big city since he has no answers as to how to stop it. It seems a lot of leftists devoted to their ideologies are into this sort of fatalism when faced with difficult problems that they are responsible to make hard choices to resolve. Brown won't resolve anything if it interferes with his beloved global warming 'narrative' so he just tells California's citizens 'lay back and enjoy it.'
 
Here's the thing. Unbeknownst to Brown, who can't let up with his climate change tautologies enough to stop a recurring weather problem, California's first responders have been making progress in figuring out how to contain wildfires and minimize their damage to homess. The San Diego Union-Tribune has an excellent piece on how fire science has improved, drawing on the lessons of the great fires of 2003 and 2007 to minimize the damage in the current fires, such as the Lilac Fire in Bonsall and the smaller towns in its vicinity. That fire has led to the loss of 105 homes, but this is better than the record of Santa Rosa's fires two months ago. What needs to be done is to share that knowledge gained with more counties, including those which don't have many wildfires such as Santa Rosa.
 
What the state doesn't need is for Moonbeam Jerry Brown to tell citizens there's nothing to be done. There is plenty he can do but he won't do it. How convenient for him to blame global warming instead of make the hard choices that go against his 'narrative.'
 
 
 
 
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