How to Save California’s Forests

For about twenty million years, California’s forests endured countless droughts, some lasting over a century. Natural fires, started by lightening and very frequent in the Sierras, were essential to keep forest ecosystems healthy. In Yosemite, for example, meadows used to cover most of the valley floor, because while forests constantly encroached, fires would periodically wipe them out, allowing the meadows to return. Across millennia, fire driven successions of this sort played out in cycles throughout California’s ecosystems.

Also for the last twenty million years or so, climate change has been the norm. To put this century’s warming into some sort of context, Giant Sequoias once grew on the shores of Mono Lake. For at least the past few centuries, forest ecosystems have been marching into higher latitudes because of gradual warming. In the Sierra Foothills, oaks have invaded pine habitat, and pine have in-turn invaded the higher elevation stands of fir. Today, it is mismanagement, not climate change, that is the primary threat to California’s forests. This can be corrected.

In a speech before the U.S. Congress last September, Republican Tom McClintock summarized the series of policy mistakes that are destroying California’s forests. McClintock’s sprawling 4th Congressional District covers 12,800 square miles, and encompasses most of the Northern Sierra Nevada mountain range. His constituency bears the brunt of the misguided green tyranny emanating from Washington DC and Sacramento. Here’s an excerpt from that speech:

“Excess timber comes out of the forest in only two ways – it is either carried out or it burns out. For most of the 20th Century, we carried it out. It’s called ‘logging.’ Every year, US Forest Service foresters would mark off excess timber and then we auctioned it off to lumber companies who paid us to remove it, funding both local communities and the forest service. We auctioned grazing contracts on our grasslands. The result: healthy forests, fewer fires and a thriving economy. But beginning in the 1970’s, we began imposing environmental laws that have made the management of our lands all but impossible. Draconian restrictions on logging, grazing, prescribed burns and herbicide use on public lands have made modern land management endlessly time consuming and ultimately cost prohibitive. A single tree thinning plan typically takes four years and more than 800 pages of analysis. The costs of this process exceed the value of timber – turning land maintenance from a revenue-generating activity to a revenue-consuming one.”

When it comes to carrying out timber, California used to do a pretty good job. In the 1950s the average timber harvest in California was around 6.0 billion board feet per year. The precipitous drop in harvest volume came in the 1990s. The industry started that decade taking out not quite 5.0 billion board feet, and by 2000 the annual harvest had dropped to just over 2.0 billion board feet. Today, only about 1.5 billion board feet per year come out of California’s forests as harvested timber.

Expand the Timber Industry

What Congressman McClintock describes as a working balance up until the 1990s needs to be restored. In order to achieve a sustainable balance between natural growth and timber removals, California’s timber industry needs to triple in size. If federal legislation were to guarantee a long-term right for timber companies to harvest trees on federal land, investment would follow.

Today only 29 sawmills remain in California, along with eight sawmills that are still standing but inactive. In addition, there are 112 sites in California where sawmills once operated. In most cases, these vacant sites of former mills are located in ideal areas to rebuild a mill and resume operations.

The economics of reviving California’s timber industry are compelling. A modern sawmill with a capacity of 100 million board feet per year requires an investment of $100 million. Operating at a profit, it would create 640 full time jobs. Constructing 30 of these sawmills would create roughly 20,000 jobs in direct employment of loggers, haulers and mill workers, along with thousands of additional jobs in the communities where they are located.

The ecological impact of logging again in California’s state and federal forests will not become the catastrophe that environmentalists and regulators once used as the pretext to all but destroy the logging industry. Especially now, with decades of accumulated experience, logging does more good than harm to forest ecosystems. There is evidence to prove this.

In forests managed by Sierra Pacific, for example, owl counts are higher than in California’s federally managed forests. Even clear cutting, because it is done on a 60 to 100 year cycle, does more good than harm to the forests. By converting one or two percent of the forest back into meadow each year, area is opened up where it is easier for owls to hunt prey. Also, during a clear cut, the needles and branches are stripped off the trees and left to rejuvenate the soil. The runoff is managed as well, via contour tilling which follows the topography of the hillsides. Rain percolates into the furrows, which is also where the replacement trees are planted.

While clear cutting will not destroy most ecosystems, since it is only performed on one to two percent of the land in any given year, there are other types of logging that can be used in areas deemed more ecologically sensitive. Southern California Edison owns 20,000 acres of forest around Shaver Lake in Southern California where they practice what is referred to as total ecosystem management.

Earlier this year, when the Creek Fire burned an almost unthinkable 550 square miles in Southern California, the 30 square mile island of SCE managed forest around Shaver Lake was unscathed. This is because for decades, SCE has been engaged in timber operations they define as “uneven age management, single tree selection,” whereby the trees to be harvested are individually designated in advance, in what remains a profitable logging enterprise. Controlled burns are also an essential part of SCE’s total ecosystem management, but these burns are only safe when the areas to be burned are caught up on logging and thinning.

The practice of uneven age management could be utilized in riparian canyons, or in areas where valuable stands of old growth merit preservation. The alternative, a policy of hands-off preservation, has been disastrous. Tree density in the Sierra Nevada is currently around 300 per acre, whereas historically, a healthy forest would only have had around 60 trees per acre. Clearly this number varies depending on forest type, altitude and other factors, but overall, California’s forests, especially on federal lands, contain about five times the normal tree density. The result are trees that cannot compete for adequate moisture and nutrients, far less rain percolating into springs and aquifers, disease and infestation of the weakened trees, and fire.

This alternative – manage the forest or suffer fires that destroy the forest entirely – cannot be emphasized enough. In the Feather River Canyon, along with many other canyons along the Sierra Nevada, the east-west topography turned them into wind tunnels that drove fires rapidly up and down the watershed. Yet these riparian areas have been among the most fiercely defended against any logging, which made those fires all the worse. The choice going forward should not be difficult. Logging and forest thinning cannot possibly harm a watershed as much as parched forests burning down to the soil, wiping out everything.

Expand the Biomass Power Industry

If removing trees with timber operations is essential to return California’s forests to a sustainable, lower density of trees per acre, mechanical removal of shrub and undergrowth is an essential corollary, especially in areas that are not clear cut. Fortunately, California has already developed the infrastructure to do this. In fact, California’s biomass industry used to be bigger than it is today, and can be quickly expanded.

Today there are 22 active biomass power plants in California, generating just over a half-gigawatt of continuous electric power. That’s one percent of California’s electricity draw at peak demand; not a lot, but enough to matter. Mostly built in the 1980s and ’90s, at peak there were 60 biomass power plants in California, but with the advent of cheaper natural gas and cheaper solar power, most of them were shut down. These clean burning plants should be opened back up to use forest trimmings, as well as agricultural waste and urban waste as fuel.

At a fully amortized wholesale cost estimated somewhere between 12 cents and 14 cents per kilowatt-hour, biomass power plants cannot compete with most other forms of energy. But this price is not so far out of reach that it could not be subsidized using funds currently being allocated to other forms of renewables infrastructure or climate change mitigation. Moreover, this kilowatt-hour price necessarily includes the labor intensive task of going into the forests and extracting the biomass, creating thousands of good paying jobs. The numbers could work.

If, for example, biomass power capacity in California were roughly doubled to 1.0 gigawatt of continuous output, a six cents per kilowatt-hour subsidy would cost about $500 million per year. This must be compared to the annual cost of wildfires in California, which easily exceeds a billion per year. It also must be compared to the amount of money being thrown around on projects far less urgent than rescuing California’s forest ecosystems, such as the California High Speed Rail project, which has already consumed billions. And if this entire subsidy of $500M per year were spread into the utility bills of all Californians, it would only amount to about a 1.5 percent increase.

Will Politicians Do the Right Thing?

The logic of these steps seems impeccable. Thin the forests. Restore them to ecological health. Adopt time tested modern logging practices and revive the timber industry. Build biomass power plants on the perimeter of the forests. Reissue grazing permits for additional cost-effective brush thinning. Prevent ridiculous, costly, horrific, tragic wildfires. Help the economy.

But these steps have been known for decades, and nothing was done. Every time policymakers were close to a consensus on forest thinning, government bureaucrats obstructed the process and the environmentalists sued to stop the process. And they won. Time and time again. And now we have this: millions of acres of scorched earth, air so foul that people couldn’t leave their homes for weeks, and wildlife habitat that in some cases will never recover. If this failure in policy doesn’t leave Californians livid, nothing will.

The forest management policies adopted in California have decimated California’s timber industry, neglected its biomass industry, turned millions of acres of forest into scorched earth, and are systematically turning mountain communities into ghost towns. This is tyranny, and perhaps even worse, it is tyranny that lacks either benevolence or wisdom.

If the goal was to have a healthy forest ecosystem, that was violated, as these forests burned to the ground and what remains is dying. If the goal was do anything in the name of fighting climate change and its impact on the forests, and do it with urgency, that too was violated, because everything they did was wrong. Even now, instead of urgent and far reaching changes to forest management policies, we get more electric car mandates. That was the urgent response.

California’s ruling elites, starting with Gavin Newsom among the politicians, and Ramon Cruz, the Sierra Club’s new president, may prove they care about the environment by sitting down with representatives from California’s timber, biomass energy, and cattle industries, along with federal regulators, and come up with a plan. They might apply to this plan the same scope and urgency with which they so cavalierly transform our entire energy and transportation sectors, but perhaps with more immediate practical benefits both to people and ecosystems.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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America’s Western Forests – A Massive Soft Target

On October 28, 2019, with American commandos closing in, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest and took his life. On January 3, 2020, Qassem Soleimani was blown to bits in a U.S. air strike. Baghdadi was the leader of ISIS; Soleimani was Iran’s most powerful military commander.

Despite losing the territory it had overran in Syria and Iraq, and despite Baghdadi’s death, ISIS remains a growing threat, with operations all over the world. Similarly, despite Soleimani’s death, under his leadership Iran helped Hezbollah grow into a powerful and expanding international network.

Already bitter enemies of America, how have ISIS and Hezbollah escalated their war after seeing their leaders killed by U.S. forces? What sort of activities have they initiated on U.S. soil, and how have those activities increased in recent years, especially in 2020?

The destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 by Al Qaeda terrorists, along with gruesome lone wolf attacks by Islamic jihadists, tend to overshadow the fact that ISIS and Hezbollah have been quietly building their networks within the United States for many years. There is evidence these organizations could be involved in the unrest that has convulsed the nation over the past few months, possibly including arson in the Western Forests.

In 2017, veteran journalist and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine, Edward Klein, published an article in the Daily Mail alleging that U.S. left wing Antifa groups traveled to Germany to meet with Al Qaeda and ISIS leaders. In his report, Klein alleges that the terrorist organizations were helping these U.S. left wing groups to acquire bomb making equipment and toxic chemicals and gasses.

Quoting extensively from a secret FBI report, Klein wrote, “Making some sort of common cause with Americans who are determined to commit violence against the U.S. makes them potentially very useful to radical Islam.”

Klein went on to explain how Trump changed the rules of engagement, which caused ISIS to intensify its relationships with the radical Left in America: “As the Trump administration has demonstrated it’s serious about destroying the Islamic State, and depriving ISIS of territory in Iraq and Syria, the alliance between the American radicals and ISIS has grown even closer. The Internet chatter between the Americans and the Islamists is astronomical.” Klein also noted how, by comparison, Obama ignored the domestic threat: “The FBI is really playing catchup ball, because the Obama administration refused to give the bureau the resources it needed to effectively infiltrate and surveil the radical groups on college campuses.”

If ISIS is a relatively recent arrival, Hezbollah has been actively building a base in the United States for years. Also in 2017, writing for Politico, investigative reporter John Meyer published a lengthy report entitled “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.” In his analysis, Meyer describes how Hezbollah “transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.”

In his desperation to forge a deal with Iran, according to Meyer, Obama ignored evidence amassed by the DEA that showed how Hezbollah was making hundreds of millions by shipping cocaine and other drugs through Venezuela and Mexico into the United States. One DEA whistleblower quoted in Klein’s article said “The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away. So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”

International Terrorists, Domestic Insurrectionists

While Antifa militants reportedly networked with ISIS militants in Germany in 2017, in 2013 the Black Lives Matter movement began getting support from the Venezuelan regime. In a report just published in American Greatness, aptly titled “The Complex and International Fight for America’s Future,” retired CIA agent Gary Berntsen describes how in 2013, Black Lives Matter founder Opal Tometi and her entourage traveled to Venezuela for meetings with Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. Berntsen writes, “During those meetings, Chavez ordered that BLM be given $10 million to help create a foundational base for their organization.”

In his article Berntsen documents how Chavez ceded control of three southern provinces to Colombian narco-terrorist organizations, entering into a joint venture with them to pour hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States. Most of this cocaine found its way into America’s inner cities, an irony perhaps lost on BLM militants but useful to America’s enemies: Destroy their lives with drugs, then give money to agitators who will tell the drug addled mobs that racism, not drugs, is the reason for their destitute lot.

If you want to engage in asymmetric terrorism, there are few options more potent than wildfire arson. The forests of the Western United States, overgrown and tinder dry thanks to years of mismanagement, are easy targets. There isn’t a lot of hard evidence that the devastating wildfires consuming America’s forests this year are being set by politically motivated arsonists, but there is plenty of evidence that ISIS has been encouraging it.

In early 2017, ISIS praised the arsonists that had recently torched forests throughout Israel and provided instructions on how to use arson to “impose terror on an entire country.” In July 2017, in the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, author Janos Besenyo elaborated on the over 220 forest fires started by arsonists in 2016 in an article entitled “Inferno Terror: Forest Fires as the New Form of Terrorism.”

Then in October 2017, after Californians had just endured another round of devastating wildfires, ISIS celebrated the catastrophe in its newsletter, “days after supporters suggested laying gasoline-filled bottles in the woods to inflict further damage.”

On November 3, 2019, days after Baghdadi’s death, “A media outlet affiliated with ISIS has been instructing the group’s radical adherents to set forest fires in the United States and Europe to cause mass ecological disasters, according to posts on an internet forum dedicated to the terror group.” This was widely reported in journals ranging from Fox News and the New York Post to Law Enforcement Today.

Less than a year later, is it mere coincidence that over 7,000 square miles of America’s western forests have been incinerated so far this year, or were some of these hundreds of fires started not just by arsonists, but politically motivated arsonists? Just this past May, as reported in Homeland Security Today, “ISIS Ramps Up Use of Wildfire Arson as Simple Tactic.”

There isn’t much of anything in current reporting about the role of foreign terrorist groups in starting this years wildfires, in fact, there are only scant reports of arson causing any of them. The prevailing narrative is that lightning strikes and human carelessness have sparked fires in forests that are tinder dry because of climate change. But there is plenty of evidence of connections between foreign terrorist groups and Antifa and Black Lives Matter. And there is little reason to believe that at least some of the domestic militants who are willing to loot and burn down American cities and invade American suburbs would hesitate to ignite American forests.

To be fair, America’s insurrectionists seem to have support from a plethora of institutions and individuals. Democrats and their media allies, to the extent they acknowledge the severity of the violence, attribute it to “Trump’s America,” hoping it will destroy him politically. Money pours in to the BLM movement from globalist billionaires and America’s major corporations. It would strain credulity to suggest that Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies aren’t finding ways to discretely lend a hand.

Perhaps America’s own deep state is coordinating elements of America’s leftist insurrection, although we may hope that with these fires they’ve gotten more than they bargained for. But it’s quite obvious that powerful federal bureaucrats including members of the intelligence community want Trump out. And then there are the climate change activists, solidly entrenched within every significant institution in America. No doubt for many of them, these forest fires are a regrettable but necessary step towards depopulating America’s rural landscapes, and ratcheting down the screws of green tyranny all that much tighter, all that much sooner.

With all that to contend with, one might consider a role in America’s ongoing insurrection for ISIS and Hezbollah to be an insignificant sideshow. That would be a dangerous mistake. They are here, and they have embraced wildfire arson as a recommended tactic. They are powerful, bent on vengeance, with eager accomplices among the more hardened elements of the American Left.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Firefighting Unions Can Help Fix Forestry Mismanagement

What we quaintly refer to as “super fires” have incinerated nearly 5,000 square miles of California’s forests so far this year. In response, Governor Newsom has declared he has “no more patience for climate deniers.” But it isn’t climate change that caused these superfires. It was negligent forestry.

When it comes to facts that matter on the issue of our burning forests, perhaps Newsom is the one who is in denial. Because when Newsom denounces “climate deniers,” he denies the following far more pertinent facts about wildfires and climate:

  • The timber industry in California has been cut to a small fraction of what it was in 1990 in terms of employment and board feet of timber harvested. In 1990, 6.0 billion board feet were harvested from California’s forests, today the harvest rarely exceeds 1.5 billion board feet.
  • Dense, overgrown forests result in unhealthy trees, because the increased number of trees are competing for the same amount of sunlight, water and soil nutrients. This is the reason so many of them cannot resist disease and infestations, not climate change.
  • Year after year, millions of acre feet of snow and rain fall on these dense tree canopies and either evaporate immediately, or are sucked up by the overgrown, water stressed biomass as soon as they hit the ground. Far less water makes it into the aquifers and rivers as a result.
  • The overgrown forests are not only packing up to ten times more fuel than what is historically normal, but because these trees aren’t adapted to being packed so close together, half of them are dead or dying, which means they are tinder dry.

Any honest mainstream journalist, if there are any left, needs to ask Governor Newsom one simple question:

“Under which conditions would be a lightning strike be more likely to cause a catastrophic fire: on a grove of stressed and dying trees, dried out and packed 200 per acre, on a 75 degree day, or on a grove of healthy trees, moist and dispersed 20 per acre on an 85 degree day?”

A child can answer this question, but perhaps Gavin Newsom isn’t interested in the truth.

The Role of California’s Firefighter Unions

When examining the impact of unionizing firefighters in California, there is little evidence that the quality of services have suffered. Problems arise, however, when considering the capacity of California’s firefighters. The super fires this year that have stretched California’s firefighting resources beyond their capacity are only an example of what could be necessary in the coming years. Not only to fight bigger wildfires, but for civil defense in the event of war or escalating terrorist incidents, California may need to put in place a firefighting infrastructure many times greater than what we have today.

This is why, for example, there may be troubling long-term consequences to union opposition to innovations such as those being explored in the City of Placentia. In response to Placentia’s decision to replace defined benefit pensions with 401A defined contribution plans, California’s professional firefighters are supporting Assembly Bill 2967, which will prohibit California’s cities and counties from exiting their pension systems. But it is simply impossible to significantly expand California’s firefighter headcount when the average full-time firefighter in California costs taxpayers well over $200,000 per year in pay and benefits. California’s professional firefighter unions are urged to recognize that what is needed today, with shrinking tax revenues and potentially multiplying threats to public safety, are not incremental but quantum increases to firefighting capacity.

To some extent the infrastructure to cost-effectively multiply firefighting capacity already exists. During fire season, CalFire enlists the services of temporary workers, prisoners and trained volunteers to help along the fire lines. These programs need to be greatly expanded, and they need to be extended to preventive activity. Also, a mid-tier of firefighting personnel needs to be established in every city and county. Between full-time unionized firefighters and the ranks of prisoners and seasonal workers, California’s cities and counties need to recruit thousands of highly trained, year-round, on-call volunteers and part-time firefighters.

If there are ever conflagrations in urban areas instead of in relatively unpopulated forests, expanded firefighting resources will save even more lives lives and property. The example of Placentia is insignificant on its own, but represents something that in the interests of public safety should be encouraged, not fought.

The other area where California’s firefighting unions have an opportunity, if not an obligation, to redirect their political priorities is with respect to forest thinning. It is difficult to imagine a category of fire prevention that even approaches the scale of this challenge. There are over 50,000 square miles of forest and chaparral in California that require a fundamental, and very labor intensive, shift in how they are managed.

It is impossible to engage in fire suppression, and impose extreme restrictions on timber harvesting, without also having an aggressive program of forest thinning. For decades, this catastrophic mistake constituted California’s forest management policy. California’s politically powerful firefighter unions can play a decisive role in lobbying for quick and meaningful corrective action.

The prevailing challenge when allocating resources to thin California’s forests is the same as that facing local elected officials who want to expand firefighting capacity in their cities and counties – how to innovate in order to accomplish more with finite budgets. California’s firefighting unions need to take the lead in encouraging creative ways to put more people and equipment in the field at less cost.

How can trained volunteers, seasonal and part-time workers, prisoners, and – one can only hope – legions of able bodied homeless people, be put into California’s forests and chaparral and effectively remove excess growth? How can California’s Dept. of Forestry, CalFire, the Dept. of Corrections, and what’s left of California’s timber industry offer resources, equipment, and supervision to make this happen? How can this job be done for a few billion dollars, in a few years, instead of costing trillions, and never get done?

Effectively coping with these issues offer an inspiring challenge to California’s professional firefighter unions. They have a chance to provide needed leadership at a critical time. It’s not the temperature, it’s the tinder.

How California’s Forests Turned Into Tinderboxes

For over 20 million years, forests existed in California at a much lower density than they are today. These forests were healthy and abundant with wildlife, and they stayed healthy through climate cycles that included droughts and so-called mega-droughts that lasted a century or more.

That all changed starting around 1850 when American settlers began logging operations that left vast clear cut areas. The second growth forests that filled these clear cut areas had a higher tree density, and this unnatural response to the original clear cuts is where the problems began.

Natural fires, usually caused by lightning strikes, probably would have burned through 2nd and 3rd growth forests, with the hardier trees surviving to restore the original ecosystems, but over the past several decades fire suppression tactics had become highly effective and were aggressively practiced. Fire ceased to be a significant source of natural thinning. Forestry officials and private landowners tried to do controlled burns, but ran into too much bureaucracy to ever do it at anywhere near the necessary scale.

The problems of overstocked forests magnified in the 1990s when logging operations throughout the Western United States came under attack from environmentalists. While logging practices needed to evolve, cutting logging activity to a fraction of what it had been for over a century caused additional density. For decades now, annual growth has far exceeded harvests.

Unhealthy, unnaturally dense forests. Far fewer smaller, natural forest fires. Almost no logging activity. It doesn’t take a genius to know what comes next.

Forestry experts including some environmentalists have been warning politicians about the fire hazards in the forests, urgently, for well over 20 years. But effective forest thinning has been prevented by environmentalist backed over-regulation.

If Gov. Newsom is in “denial” about any of this, he might explain: Why is it, if we knew this was an urgent problem, that California’s forests are still twice as dense, or more, than they were for the last 20 million years?

“Climate Change” Policies Are Misanthropic and Futile

Whenever there’s a wildfire, Newsom and all the others in denial over their epic policy failures, come shouting “climate change.” They have the audacity to tell us to turn our thermostats up to 78 degrees and refrain from using electric appliances, and they claim these fires are evidence of why this is necessary. They embark on a “renewables mandate” that jacks utility prices up to the highest in the nation in exchange for unreliable power.

More than anything else, what Newsom and all the rest of these politicians who want California to set a “climate example” to the world are in denial of is their own misanthropy. They know perfectly well that California only emits one percent of the world’s CO2. They know as well that China and India are not about to stop using fossil fuel to grow their economies. They know that fossil fuel accounts for 85 percent of global energy production, with hydroelectric and nuclear power accounting for another 11 percent. All renewables account for only four percent of global energy production. Four percent.

Although one often wonders, Newsom is smart enough to figure out, based on readily available and indisputable data, that if everyone in the world, per capita, used half as much energy as Americans do, global energy production would have to double. And it will. And for the next 20-30 years, fossil fuel is going to account for a large portion of that.

Someday, probably within the lifetime of most people alive today, there will be a series of breakthroughs in energy technology. Fusion power. Satellite solar power stations. Direct synthesis of atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuel. Who knows? But until that time, the only reason to impoverish the lives of ordinary Californians in the name of the “climate crisis” is so rich and powerful people like Gavin Newsom can get even richer and even more powerful.

Once this horrific fire season comes to an end, there is just one thing Gavin Newsom should be doing as follow up. He needs to figure out how California’s forests are going to be rapidly thinned from, using the Sierra Nevada as an example, 200 or more trees per acre, down to the historical norm of 40 trees or less per acre. No forest management solutions are perfect. But in search of perfection, we engineered a cataclysm. Have we learned? Or will we just watch the rest of our forests burn up, and blame it on climate change?

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Policy Center.

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It’s Not the Temperature, It’s the Tinder

AUDIO:  Blaming “climate change” is a good way to avoid responsibility for epic mismanagement. Why we need forest thinning, more logging, and controlled burns to save our overgrown and unhealthy forests – 9 minutes on KFI Los Angeles – Edward Ring on the John and Ken Show.

Mismanaged Forests Burn, Newsom Blames “Climate Deniers”

What we quaintly refer to as “super fires” have incinerated nearly 5,000 square miles of California’s forests so far this year. In response, Governor Newsom has declared he has “no more patience for climate deniers.” But it isn’t climate change that caused these superfires. It was negligent forestry.

When it comes to facts that matter on the issue of our burning forests, perhaps Newsom is the one who is in denial. Because when Newsom denounces “climate deniers,” he denies the following far more pertinent facts about wildfires and climate:

  • The timber industry in California has been cut to a small fraction of what it was in 1990 in terms of employment and board feet of timber harvested. In 1990, 6.0 billion board feet were harvested from California’s forests, today the harvest rarely exceeds 1.5 billion board feet.
  • Dense, overgrown forests result in unhealthy trees, because the increased number of trees are competing for the same amount of sunlight, water and soil nutrients. This is the reason so many of them cannot resist disease and infestations, not climate change.
  • Year after year, millions of acre feet of snow and rain fall on these dense tree canopies and either evaporate immediately, or are sucked up by the overgrown, water stressed biomass as soon as they hit the ground. Far less water makes it into the aquifers and rivers as a result.
  • The overgrown forests are not only packing up to ten times more fuel than what is historically normal, but because these trees aren’t adapted to being packed so close together, half of them are dead or dying, which means they are tinder dry.

Any honest mainstream journalist, if there are any left, needs to ask Governor Newsom one simple question:

“Under which conditions would be a lightning strike be more likely to cause a catastrophic fire: on a grove of stressed and dying trees, dried out and packed 200 per acre, on a 75 degree day, or on a grove of healthy trees, moist and dispersed 20 per acre on an 85 degree day?”

A child can answer this question, but perhaps Gavin Newsom isn’t interested in the truth.

How California’s Forests Turned Into Tinderboxes

For over 20 million years, forests existed in California at a much lower density than they are today. These forests were healthy and abundant with wildlife, and they stayed healthy through climate cycles that included droughts and so-called mega-droughts that lasted a century or more.

That all changed starting around 1850 when American settlers began logging operations that left vast clear cut areas. The second growth forests that filled these clear cut areas had a higher tree density, and this unnatural response to the original clear cuts is where the problems began.

Natural fires, usually caused by lightning strikes, probably would have burned through 2nd and 3rd growth forests, with the hardier trees surviving to restore the original ecosystems, but over the past several decades fire suppression tactics had become highly effective and were aggressively practiced. Fire ceased to be a significant source of natural thinning. Forestry officials and private landowners tried to do controlled burns, but ran into too much bureaucracy to ever do it at anywhere near the necessary scale.

The problems of overstocked forests magnified in the 1990s when logging operations throughout the Western United States came under attack from environmentalists. While logging practices needed to evolve, cutting logging activity to a fraction of what it had been for over a century caused additional density. For decades now, annual growth has far exceeded harvests.

Unhealthy, unnaturally dense forests. Far fewer smaller, natural forest fires. Almost no logging activity. It doesn’t take a genius to know what comes next.

Forestry experts including some environmentalists have been warning politicians about the fire hazards in the forests, urgently, for well over 20 years. But effective forest thinning has been prevented by environmentalist backed over-regulation.

If Gov. Newsom is in “denial” about any of this, he might explain: Why is it, if we knew this was an urgent problem, that California’s forests are still twice as dense, or more, than they were for the last 20 million years?

“Climate Change” Policies Are Misanthropic and Futile

Whenever there’s a wildfire, Newsom and all the others in denial over their epic policy failures, come shouting “climate change.” They have the audacity to tell us to turn our thermostats up to 78 degrees and refrain from using electric appliances, and they claim these fires are evidence of why this is necessary. They embark on a “renewables mandate” that jacks utility prices up to the highest in the nation in exchange for unreliable power.

More than anything else, what Newsom and all the rest of these politicians who want California to set a “climate example” to the world are in denial of is their own misanthropy. They know perfectly well that California only emits one percent of the world’s CO2. They know as well that China and India are not about to stop using fossil fuel to grow their economies. They know that fossil fuel accounts for 85 percent of global energy production, with hydroelectric and nuclear power accounting for another 11 percent. All renewables account for only four percent of global energy production. Four percent.

Although one often wonders, Newsom is smart enough to figure out, based on readily available and indisputable data, that if everyone in the world, per capita, used half as much energy as Americans do, global energy production would have to double. And it will. And for the next 20-30 years, fossil fuel is going to account for a large portion of that.

Someday, probably within the lifetime of most people alive today, there will be a series of breakthroughs in energy technology. Fusion power. Satellite solar power stations. Direct synthesis of atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuel. Who knows? But until that time, the only reason to impoverish the lives of ordinary Californians in the name of the “climate crisis” is so rich and powerful people like Gavin Newsom can get even richer and even more powerful.

Once this horrific fire season comes to an end, there is just one thing Gavin Newsom should be doing as follow up. He needs to figure out how California’s forests are going to be rapidly thinned from, using the Sierra Nevada as an example, 200 or more trees per acre, down to the historical norm of 40 trees or less per acre. No forest management solutions are perfect. But in search of perfection, we engineered a cataclysm. Have we learned? Or will we just watch the rest of our forests burn up, and blame it on climate change?

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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Why Our Forests Are Burning

AUDIO:  Why climate change should not be an excuse for failing to manage California’s forests – 10 minutes on KNRS Salt Lake City – Edward Ring on the Rod Arquette Show.

Environmentalists Destroyed California’s Forests

Millions of acres of California forest have been blackened by wildfires this summer, leading to the usual angry denunciations from the usual quarters about climate change. But in 1999, the Associated Press reported that forestry experts had long agreed that “clearing undergrowth would save trees,” and that “years of aggressive firefighting have allowed brush to flourish that would have been cleared away by wildfires.” But very little was done. And now fires of unprecedented size are raging across the Western United States.

“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.

Year after year, environmentalists litigated and lobbied to stop efforts to clear the forests through timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns. Meanwhile, natural fires were suppressed and the forests became more and more overgrown. The excessive biomass competed for the same water, soil, and light a healthier forest would have used, rendering all of the trees and underbrush unhealthy. It wasn’t just excess biomass that accumulated, but dried out and dead biomass.

What happened among California’s tall stands of Redwood and Ponderosa Pine also happened in its extensive chaparral. Fire suppression along with too many environmentalist-inspired bureaucratic barriers to controlled burns and undergrowth removal turned the hillsides and canyons of Southern California into tinderboxes.

In 2009, after huge blazes wiped out homes and forced thousands to evacuate, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich observed: “The environmentalists have gone to the extreme to prevent controlled burns, and as a result we have this catastrophe today.”

In 2014, Republican members of Congress tried again to reduce the bureaucracy associated with “hazardous fuel projects” that thin out overgrown forests. True to form, the bill got nowhere thanks to environmental lobbyists who worried it would undermine the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the law that requires thorough impact assessments ahead of government decisions on public lands.

In a blistering report published in the California Globe on how environmentalists have destroyed California’s forests, investigative journalist Katy Grimes interviewed Representative Tom McClintock, a Republican who represents communities in and around the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California. McClintock has worked for years to reform NEPA and other barriers to responsible forest management.

“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.

Decimating the Timber Industry, Disrupting the Ecosystem

Few people, including the experts, bother to point out how overgrown forests reduce the water supply. But when watersheds are choked with dense underbrush competing for moisture, precipitation and runoff cannot replenish groundwater aquifers or fill up reservoirs. Instead, it’s immediately soaked up by the trees and brush. Without clearing and controlled burns, the overgrown foliage dies anyway.

A new activist organization in California, the “California Water for Food and People Movement,” created a Facebook group for people living in the hellscape created by misguided environmentalist zealotry. Comments and posts from long-time residents of the Sierra foothills, where fires have exploded in recent years, yield eyewitness testimony to how environmentalist restrictions on forest management have gone horribly wrong. Examples:

“I’m 70, and I remember controlled burns, logging, and open grazing.”

“With the rainy season just ahead, the aftermath of the Creek Fire will challenge our water systems for years to come. Erosion will send toxic debris and sediment cascading into streams, rivers, and reservoirs, reducing their capacity to carry and hold water. Dirty air, dirty water, and the opposite of environmentalism are on full display right now, brought to us by the environmental posers who will no doubt use this crisis to unleash a barrage of ‘climate change did it’ articles.”

“Many thanks to Sierra Club and other environmental groups. You shut down logging/brush removal and had a ‘don’t touch’ approach to our forests. You shut down access roads and let them get overgrown, so now they can’t be used for fire suppression and emergency equipment. You fought ranchers for grazing, which helped keep the forest floors clean. You made fun of Trump when he said we need to rake the forest. Trust me these forest rakes and logging would have prevented the devastating fires we see now.”

The economics of responsible forest management, given the immensity of America’s western forests, requires profitable timber harvesting to play a role. But California has no commercial timber operations on state-owned land. And since 1990, when the environmentalist assault on California’s timber industry began in earnest, its timber industry has shrunk to half its former size. Reviving California’s timber industry, so the collective rate of harvest equals the collective rate of growth, would go a long way towards solving the problem of catastrophic fires.

Instead, California’s environmentalists only redouble their nonsense arguments. Expect these fires to justify even more “climate change” legislation that does nothing to clear the forests of overgrown tinder, and everything to clear the forests, and the chaparral, of people and towns.

Expect these fires to fuel a new round of legislation containing urban growth while mandating suburban densification, with increased rationing of energy and water.

Expect the “climate emergency” to accelerate in synergistic lockstep with the pandemic emergency and the anti-racism emergency. Expect all three of these emergencies to become issues of public health, thereby eliminating inconvenient constitutional roadblocks to swift action.

Misdirected Union Priorities

Meanwhile, tragically, expect California’s politically powerful firefighters’ union to do little or nothing to support the timber industry or rural inhabitants who don’t want to move into urban condos.

As Steve Greenhut explained in a recent column in the Orange County Register: “Frankly, union power drives state and local firefighting policies. The median compensation package for firefighters has topped $240,000 a year in some locales. California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection firefighters earn less, but their packages still total nearly $150,000 a year. The number of California firefighters who receive compensation packages above $500,000 a year is mind-blowing.”

No wonder firefighters are overwhelmed during California’s wildfire season. The state can’t afford to hire enough of them.

And when these firefighter unions could have been pushing for legislation to clear the forests back in 2019, where instead did their leftist leadership direct their activist efforts? They marched in solidarity with the striking United Teachers of Los Angeles. The teachers’ unions have done to California’s public schools what environmentalists have done to California’s forests.

If an honest history of California in the early 21st century is ever written, the verdict will be unequivocal. Forests that thrived in California for over 20 million years were allowed to become overgrown tinderboxes. And then, with stupefying ferocity, within the span of a few decades, they burned to the ground. Many of them never recovered.

This epic tragedy was the direct result of policies put in place by misguided environmentalist zealots, misinformed suckers who sent them money, and the litigators and lobbyists they hired, who laughed all the way to the bank.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

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Environmentalists Caused Australia’s Fires, Not “Climate Change”

“These greenies and the government don’t want to burn s— off. We’re going to lose all our houses and properties because of you useless pieces of garbage will not burn off when its supposed to, through the winter time like we used to do years ago out in the farms up in the mountains; burn all the undergrowth off so everything was safe. But you p—–, you want to have a really good look at this, look at the state you’ve caused here. You are the biggest bunch of useless loser pieces of garbage God ever had the misfortune to blow life into.”
– Australian resident of New South Wales, January 7, 2020

This is the reason for this year’s devastating wildfires in Australia. Environmentalist regulations prevented landowners from burning off dry brush. For decades, every year during the Australian winter, across the continent, brushfires were deliberately set to safely burn the undergrowth. Even in pre-colonial times, the aborigines set brushfires to prevent tinder from accumulating.

If you want to watch an authentic, eyewitness account of what really happened – quoted above – you’ll find it 2:56 minutes into “The Truth About the Australian Bushfires,” a video posted on January 7th by the inimitable Paul Joseph Watson. But watch out. Most of the profanity is edited out of the above transcription.

Profanity is appropriate, however, given the frustration that level headed people have to feel when they confront the fanatics who want to micromanage every aspect of our lives in the name of fighting climate change, and the corporate opportunists who stand behind them. In most cases, the political agenda pursued in the name of fighting climate change is an expensive nuisance. But this time, down under, it has quite literally flared into a devastating inferno.

Terrifying Pablum vs Data and Common Sense

Rather than identify the countless recent examples of the predictable, infantile, Thunbergian, agenda-driven fearmongering propaganda that has been spawned by this latest “climate” disaster in Australia, let’s examine what’s really happening. Thankfully, sources of useful information can still be found online.

A good place to start would be an article posted on January 3rd entitled “Smoke And Deception Blanket Australia: NASA GISS Fudges Data, Cooling Turns Into Warming,” on Pierre Gosselin’s skeptic website NoTricksZone. In the article, the authors present a fascinating set of graphics showing a century of temperature data from field stations across Australia. In every graph, the raw data is shown, then the “homogenized” data is shown. For the uninitiated, homogenization of temperature data is a statistical process used “to remove non-climatic factors so that the temporal variations in the adjusted data reflect only the variations due to climate processes.”

This sounds innocent enough, but have a look at these graphics, before and after homogenization. In every case, what appears to be a flat temperature trend is turned into a rising temperature trend. In every case. How can this be? Is it urban heat island effects, as cities grew up around the measuring stations? But if so, wouldn’t eliminating that factor cause the homogenized data to show lower temperatures than the raw data? Reading the comments that accompany that article will provide additional insights, but the point here is not to accuse the analysts who homogenize data of introducing bias into their work. The point is that the only data we ever see in official press summaries is the homogenized data, and that this data is often manipulated using methods that rely on arbitrary interpretations of multiple variables.

Another source of insight into what’s really causing Australia’s catastrophic wildfires this year can be found on the website Global Warming, authored by climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer. In his article posted January 8th, “Are Australia Bushfires Worsening from Human-Caused Climate Change?,” Spencer acknowledges a warming trend in Australia, along with a long-term upward trend in precipitation on the arid Australian continent. He concludes there is a slight correlation between climate conditions and increased risk of wildfires. But Spencer, along with everyone else paying honest attention to the disaster, blames the extreme intensity of the fires to “the increasing pressure by the public to reduce prescribed burns, clearing of dead vegetation, and cutting of fire breaks, which the public believes to have short term benefits to beauty and wildlife preservation, but results in long term consequences that are just the opposite and much worse.”

It is important to acknowledge another cause of wildfires in Australia, which is arson. As of January 7th, more than 180 arsonists have been arrested since the start of the brushfire season. But arson, just like faulty PG&E transmission lines in California, only starts the fires. It’s the buildup of tinder, thanks to misguided wildland management policies, that make these fires so devastating.

Environmentalist Rules Prevented Responsible Wildfire Prevention

What’s happening in Australia is preventable. The title of an article published on January 11th in The Spectator says it all, “Fight fire with fire: controlled burning could have protected Australia.” The author, Australian Tim Blair, writes “A kind of ecological fundamentalism has taken the place of common sense.”

Blair provides several examples of land owners and utilities in Australia who were fined by the government for clearing “safe space” around their homes and other structures, or for clearing firebreaks, or for setting controlled burns. The level of extremism has reached the point, where, according to Blair, you can’t even remove deadwood and fallen trees. These restrictions, aggressively enforced for over twenty years in Australia, are the reason these wildfires are now “superfires.”

Over the past few days, the debate over controlled burns has intensified, as can be seen by mainstream press publishing stories such as “Prescribed burning: what is it and will more reduce bushfire risks?,” Sydney Morning Herald, January 7th, “Would Controlled Burns Help Australia Manage Massive Wildfire?,” NPR, January 9th, and “Australia fires: Does controlled burning really work?,” BBC, January 9th.”

But at the same time, the spin merchants are out in full force, quoted in articles that suggest anyone who thinks environmentalist regulations caused tinder in Australia to get out of control are “conspiracy theorists.” For that perspective, turn to the Guardian’s January 4th article “Explainer: how effective is bushfire hazard reduction on Australia’s fires?,” where they argue that “claims of a Greens conspiracy to block hazard reduction have been rejected by bushfire experts.”

One of the more frustrating examples of green spin is the a recent opinion column in the New York Times. In a column entitled “Australia Is Burning: Hazard reduction is more complex than some would have you believe,” the New York Times has trotted out Australian bureaucrat, Cormac Farrell, who has made a career in “bush fire planning and design.” Farrell proudly describes the fire shelters he’s helped build along with designing “Asset Protection Zones” which are areas of thinned and cleared vegetation. He dismisses calls for more large tracts of the landscape to be regularly burned by quoting H.L. Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”

Cormac Farrell is probably sincere in his views, and people like Farrell are useful to the propagandists at the New York Times. But his expertise, his informed expressions of the complexity of the problem, are examples of a greater problem, which is the paralysis that ensues when environmentalist regulations micromanage land management. Imagine the frustration that Australian landowners must have felt over the past few decades, when they wanted to burn off their land, just like their parents and grandparents had, just like the aborigines had before that, and they had to spend time and money on permit applications, and hire consultants (such as Mr. Farrell) to perform impact studies, and meanwhile the tinder accumulated?

This problem – regulatory micromanagement, and the anonymous faces of the innocent bureaucrats who can’t speed up the “process” (assuming they even want to) – can be extrapolated to every area of government overreach, from burning off brush in rural Australia to getting a building permit in California. But there is a special irony to see it happening in the context of the environment, the wildfires, and the climate “crisis,” because it is during a crisis that supposedly we do “whatever it takes, regardless of cost.” What it takes, in this case, is letting rural landowners clear firebreaks, create defensible space, and set controlled burns during the winter months. Repeal the environmentalist restrictions to what they were, say, fifty years ago, and let the work get done. Mistakes will be made, but conflagrations like the current one would never happen again.

That’s how a rational society survives a genuine crisis. But perhaps this conflagration is too convenient to ever try to prevent, insofar as it generates righteous Thunbergian green thunder across the world, solving nothing, but further empowering the bureaucrats.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Saving California From Wildfires Requires Cooperation With Trump

President Trump recently tweeted “The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management,” Newsom tweeted back, “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation.

October 29th, former Governor Jerry Brown addressed the U.S. Congress, sayingCalifornia’s burning while the deniers make a joke out of the standards that protect us all. The blood is on your soul here and I hope you wake up, because this is not politics, this is life, this is morality. You’ve got to get with it – or get out of the way.

Despite that California’s current and former governors are both ardent members of the catastrophe chorus, climate change has almost nothing to do with California’s recent wildfires. These fires are the result of a century of successful fire suppression, combined with a failure to remove all the undergrowth that results when natural fires aren’t allowed to burn. Not only does excessive undergrowth create fuel for catastrophic super fires, but these excessive trees and shrubs compete with mature trees. This is the real reason why our forests are not only tinderboxes, but also filled with dying trees.

Forest professionals who were consulted for this article were in agreement that despite the antagonistic rhetoric, and notwithstanding the misplaced “climate crisis” scapegoating and fearmongering, state officials are working with federal agencies on practical solutions. But it isn’t easy to reverse a century of forest mismanagement overnight.

While a consensus has quietly formed that forest thinning is absolutely necessary going forward, California’s timber industry has atrophied to a fraction of what had been its capacity even up until the early 1990s. While fire suppression was ongoing and, overall, was increasingly effective, environmentalist restrictions put more and more timber out of reach. The capacity of California’s timber industry is now nowhere near the size required to deliver the scale and pace of timber thinning needed to restore health to the forests and safety to communities in proximity to the forests. And in most cases, controlled burns are too risky until some of the timber and underbrush is first thinned.

In order to rapidly address the challenge of thinning California’s forests, there are several steps that have to be taken simultaneously. Environmental regulations need to be rewritten. Rules and conditions governing timber exports need to be revised or scrapped. Enabling financing such as revolving lines of credit, and long-term harvesting contracts need to be offered. The process to acquire timber harvesting permits needs to be greatly streamlined. Investments need to be made in sawmills and chippers, along with electric power plants running on biomass. Finding laborers to assist with forest thinning is a challenge that might be met by employing some of California’s homeless population.

Biomass power plants can be a big part of the solution. Running on wood chips from biomass that has no value as lumber, they can be sited close to their fuel source, the national forests. Because there will be dozens of them in a decentralized network, they can feed continuous, distributed power into the grid in the same wooded areas where power is most likely to be cut on days with high fire risk. And there is no reason why the California legislature might not consider these power plants to run on renewable energy, since they are “carbon neutral.”

California has roughly 20 million acres of forest. About half of that is federally owned. Of the other half, about 40 percent, or four million acres, are owned by private timber companies. The other six million acres are held by private, nonindustrial owners. All of these forested areas need thinning operations. Here are some of the steps that can be taken:

Revise environmental regulations that inhibit active forest management:

The U.S. Forest Service needs to recognize and admit that in California, between one-half and two-thirds of the vegetation has to be removed before these forests will be returned to a historically “resilient” condition that can resist insects, disease, and wildfire. The unnatural high density of trees and undergrowth, because of a century of successful fire suppression, is destroying the health of forests and making them far more combustible.

In particular, the U.S. Forest Service needs to get away from “single species management,” a management concept which often leads to standards and guidelines requiring “no-action” to the vegetation, i.e., no forest thinning. Spotted Owl, Northern Goshawk and Pacific Fisher examples of single species that have the largest impacts on permissible forest management using this system.

“No action” restrictions have led to more than half of California’s national forests unavailable for active management. But “no action” designations, combined with fire suppression, is fatally undermining these forest ecosystems even before super fires strike. These restrictions must be lifted.

In addition to no-action restrictions, in the national forests where thinning and other active management operations are permitted, they are limited in what times of year they can operate. In many cases these limitations last from the beginning of February through the middle of September. But in most of California’s forests, the weather only permits operations between the middle of May and the end of October. This means that in many thinning projects, the operator is only permitted to work for six weeks a year, from Sept. 15th through October 31st.

While restrictions on when and where forests can be thinned may have sound ecological justifications in some ways, they are also making it impossible to thin the forests. The ecological cost/benefits have not been properly weighed. Thinning operations need to be allowed to run for several months each year, instead of several weeks each year, and they need to encompass a far greater percentage of forested areas.

Change the rules and conditions governing timber exports

The export of raw logs from federal lands in the Western United States is currently prohibited. Lifting this prohibition would help, because sawmill capacity is not capable of handling the increase in volume. With the new thinning programs already in place, logs and undergrowth are being burned or put in landfills.

The trade war with China has stopped much of the flow of California’s wood exports. While even Trump’s critics often agree with him on the necessity to confront China’s abusive trade practices, to the extent there is an opportunity to reauthorize timber exports to China, this will help restore demand for a higher volume of wood products.

Facilitate investment in the timber and biomass industry

The federal government can set up a revolving loan fund for investors to build sawmills, as well as biomass energy facilities, as well as chippers and other equipment, that would allow the industry to quickly ramp up operations and capacity.

The federal government can accelerate granting of long term stewardship contracts whereby qualified companies acquire a minimum 20 year right to extract wood products from federal lands. This will guarantee a steady supply of wood products which, in turn, will make investment viable in logging equipment, mills, and biomass energy facilities.

Make it easier to get permits to extract timber and biomass from federal lands

In the ten national forests just within California, the U.S. Forest Service has over 100 vacancies. They need to somehow fill these positions, through transfers from other states, offering better compensation packages to attract more applicants, or by hiring private contractors. This staffing shortage is slowing the process for qualified licensed timber operators to get permits to extract wood products.

The EPA needs to streamline the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) application process so it is less expensive and time consuming for qualified companies to get permits to extract timber from federal lands. They can also grant waivers to allow thinning projects to bypass NEPA, or at the least, broaden the allowable exemptions.

Rehabilitate able-bodied homeless substance abusers – put them to work thinning the forests

The California national guard has set up and occupied encampments from which the troops are literally going into the forests to pick up cut brush. These troops could be redeployed to the US/Mexico border, or they can return to their bases. Instead, able-bodied homeless people, arrested for drug or property crimes, could be brought to these camps to work.

Cal Fire has dozens of camps that are occupied by firefighting crews which are otherwise vacant and could be occupied by homeless people to clear brush from the forests. Cal Fire is also hiring laborers to clear brush, and these laborers could be replaced with homeless people serving sentences for drug and property crimes.

Making California’s forests safer can also be an economic engine

California imports around 80 percent of the cut lumber used in its construction industry or sold through retailers to consumers. If there was an assurance of wood supply, which the national forests can certainly offer, investment would be made in expanding mill capacity. Suddenly the money that is being sent to Oregon, Washington and British Colombia to purchase their cut timber would stay here in California, employing thousands of workers in the mills.

As California’s forests are thinned, and kept that way, and the annual supply of wood is permanently increased, in-state demand would become increasingly unable to absorb in-state supply, and the surplus could be exported, earning additional profits and supporting additional jobs. Biomass plants, burning carbon neutral wood chips, could profitably generate safe, affordable, distributed electricity to rural markets, employing additional thousands and delivering returns to private investors.

Less obvious and perhaps less certain, but possibly of enormous benefit, would be the opportunity to offer redeeming work to tens of thousands of homeless people. With only modest reforms to California’s criminal code, or perhaps via a state or federal state of emergency, homeless people convicted of drug or minor property crimes could serve their time working on labor crews thinning the forests.

Cal Fire, the California Dept. of Corrections, and the California Conservation Corps are all equipped to train and house people to do this work. It might be the best thing that ever happened to thousands of young homeless Californians who, once they are freed from substance abuse, are sane, able bodied people. Thousands might recover their dignity and their future in this manner, at the same time as they help restore health to California’s forests.

Practical solutions need to replace verbal jousting and climate fearmongering

If California’s politicians feel obligated to create a public perception that they are in a permanent state of war with President Trump, that’s just politics. But they’ve been braying on about climate change for decades, and far too many of the things they’re doing in the name of fighting climate change are just plain stupid and wasteful. One may hope that reports of behind the scenes cooperation with the Trump administration on forest management are true. Much needs to be done.

Domestically, California’s insurance commissioner, the woefully unqualified ideologue Ricardo Lara, needs to prove that he’s not simply trying to depopulate California’s rural counties by driving out private fire insurance companies and forcing consumers to instead purchase the far more expensive government mandated coverage. He needs to allow private insurance companies to use forward looking risk models, instead of forcing them to base their rate increase applications on the past twenty years of fire claim data. Or, alternatively, Lara could admit that there is not anything unique about the deadly firestorms of 2017 and 2018, and that they are not the “new normal.”

Lara also needs to stop preventing private insurers to from passing their much higher – since the fire claims of 2017 and 2018 – reinsurance costs from being passed on to the ratepayers. This is particularly egregious since California’s government ran alternative fire insurance coverage – the FAIR Plan – cost far more than the private insurers will ever charge, and the FAIR insurance plans do pass on reinsurance costs to consumers, and then some.

If Governor Newsom, and his predecessor Governor Brown, insist on invoking the climate catastrophe trope at every opportunity, and if they truly believe carbon dioxide emissions constitute a mortal threat to humanity and the planet, then why aren’t they publicly advocating for lumber mills and biomass power plants in California?

Wouldn’t producing in-state timber eliminate the CO2 emissions inherent in importing timber from the Pacific Northwest and Canada? Wouldn’t biomass plants generate carbon neutral, renewable energy? And why aren’t they willing to disclose expert estimates of how much CO2 was emitted in the wild fires of 2017 and 2018? Could it be that the quantity of CO2 belched out from those fires would dwarf how much California’s economy generated over the past decade? Imagine if all that carbon, thanks to forest thinning, had instead been sequestered in lumber, or turned into carbon neutral electricity.

And why, one most never forget to ask, aren’t Newsom and Brown trying to keep Diablo Canyon nuclear power station operating, if “climate change is real.”

Could it be that Governor Newsom, despite his public posturing, doesn’t really believe in climate change? Should Newsom be “excused” from the conversation? And what about former Governor Jerry Brown? California’s forests turned into tinderboxes on his watch, and gigatons of CO2 were expelled in the resultant superfires. Perhaps the “blood” of which he speaks with such moral certitude, is on his soul.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

Long-Term Solutions for California Wildfire Prevention

Nobody knew how the fire started. It took hold in the dry chaparral and grasslands and quickly spread up the sides of the canyon. Propelled by winds gusting over 40 miles per hour and extremely dry air (humidity below 25 percent), the fire spread over the ridge and into the town below. Overwhelmed firefighters could not contain the blaze as it swept through the streets, immolating homes by the hundreds. Even brick homes with slate roofs were not spared. Before it finally was brought under control, 640 structures including 584 homes had been reduced to ashes. Over 4,000 people were left homeless.

Does this sound like the “new normal?” Maybe so, but this description is of the Berkeley fire of 1923. In its time, with barely 4 million people living in California, the Berkeley fire was a catastrophe on par with the fires we see today.

When evaluating what happened in nearly a century since this fire, two stories emerge. The story coming from California’s politicians emphasizes climate change. From former Governor Jerry Brown: “In less than five years, even the worst skeptics will be believers.” From current Governor Gavin Newsom, speaking on the threat of wildfires in the state: “If anyone is wondering if climate change is real, come to California.”

The other story, which comes from professional foresters, emphasizes how different forest management practices might have made many of the recent fires far less severe, if not avoided entirely. Specifically, California’s misguided forest management practices included several decades of successful fire suppression, combined with a failure to remove all the undergrowth that results when natural fires aren’t allowed to burn.

Back in 1923, forest fire suppression was in its infancy. But techniques and technologies improved apace with firefighting budgets, until by the second half of the 20th century, an army of firefighters coped, overall, very effectively with California’s wildfires. The result is excessive undergrowth which not only creates fuel for catastrophic and unmanageable super fires, but these excessive trees and shrubs compete with mature trees. This is the real reason why California’s forests are not only tinderboxes, but also filled with dying trees. Now Californians confront nearly 20 million acres of overgrown forests. Behind the climate change rhetoric and political posturing, a consensus has quietly formed that California’s forests need to be thinned.

In order to rapidly address the challenge of thinning California’s forests, there are several steps that may be taken simultaneously. For starters, many environmental regulations need to be rewritten. The state is already beginning to grant CEQA exemptions to property owners that want to engage in thinning operations. But half of California’s forests are on federal land. At the federal level, the EPA’s “no action” restrictions, usually based on the “single species management” practice, have led to more than half of California’s national forests being off limits to tree thinning, brush removal, or any other sort of active management.

Another required change is the U.S. Forest Service guidelines which only permit active forest management, even in the areas that are not off limits, for as little as six weeks per year. While restrictions on when and where forests can be thinned may have sound ecological justifications in some ways, they are making it impossible to thin the forests. The ecological cost/benefits need to be reassessed. To be effective, thinning operations need to be allowed to run for several months each year, instead of several weeks each year.

The EPA needs to streamline the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) application process so it is less expensive and time consuming for qualified companies to get permits to extract timber from federal lands. They can also grant waivers to allow thinning projects to bypass NEPA, or at the least, broaden the allowable exemptions.

The federal government can accelerate granting of long term stewardship contracts whereby qualified companies acquire a minimum 20 year right to extract wood products from federal lands. This will guarantee a steady supply of wood products which, in turn, will make new investment viable in logging equipment, mills, and biomass energy facilities.

Rules and conditions governing timber exports need revision. The export of raw logs from federal lands in the Western United States is currently prohibited. Lifting this prohibition would help, because sawmill capacity is not capable of handling the increase in volume. Just with the new thinning programs already in place, logs and undergrowth are being burned or put in landfills.

As it is, California imports around 80 percent of the cut lumber used in its construction industry or sold through retailers to consumers. If there was an assurance of wood supply, which the national forests can certainly offer, investment would be made in expanding mill capacity. Suddenly the money that is being sent to Oregon, Washington and British Colombia to purchase their cut timber would stay here in California, employing thousands of workers in the mills.

The state or federal government can set up revolving loan funds for investors to build sawmills, as well as biomass energy facilities, as well as chippers and other equipment, that would allow the industry to quickly ramp up operations and capacity.

As California’s forests are thinned, and kept that way, and the annual supply of wood is permanently increased, in-state demand would become increasingly unable to absorb in-state supply, and the surplus could be exported, earning additional profits and supporting additional jobs. Biomass plants, burning carbon neutral wood chips, could profitably generate safe, affordable, distributed electricity to rural markets, employing additional thousands and delivering returns to private investors.

Finally, California has an opportunity to rehabilitate able-bodied homeless substance abusers by putting them to work thinning the forests. With only modest reforms to California’s criminal code, or perhaps via a state or federal state of emergency, homeless people convicted of drug or minor property crimes could serve their time working on labor crews thinning the forests.

Cal Fire, the California Dept. of Corrections, and the California Conservation Corps are all equipped to train and house people to do this work. It might be the best thing that ever happened to thousands of young homeless Californians who, once they are freed from substance abuse, are sane, able bodied people. Thousands might recover their dignity and their future in this manner, at the same time as they help restore health to California’s forests.

The Right and Wrong Responses to California Wildfires

Many of the recommendations here are already in progress. Others should be considered. To make them happen more quickly and effectively, California’s state officials should be working with the Trump administration behind the scenes, even if they savage each other in the public square. But there are other steps California’s policymakers are taking which are harmful to working Californians.

For example, there is the growing conventional wisdom that people should not be living in the “Urban Wildland Interface” (UWI). While common sense indicates people living in the UWI cannot have the same expectations regarding fire risk as people living in the urban core, it would be a tragic mistake to deny people the ability to escape urban areas and find affordable options in rural areas.

California’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, could with a stroke of his pen, allow private insurance companies to pass on the escalating costs of reinsurance for fire prone areas to the customers who live in those areas. Because they can’t do that, private insurers are cancelling policies. California’s state run insurance which remains available to people in fire prone areas is far more expensive, which is driving people out of their homes.

There are three layers of protection against fires for people living in the UWI. The first, forest thinning, needs to involve multiple agencies cooperating based on community needs and land topography, rather than stopping at arbitrary jurisdictional boundaries. The second layer of protection requires removing combustible material along access roads, ensuring safe evacuation routes. Roads need to be wide enough to allow cars to evacuate one way at the same time as oncoming firefighting vehicles pass in the other direction. Third, homes themselves need to be hardened against embers, with brush and other combustible materials cleared away from the structures. With these conditions met, insurance against fires can be affordable, even if it still costs more than fire insurance outside of the UWI.

The threat of wildfires is not only being used to amplify panic over climate change, it is being used to justify and accelerate policies designed to combat climate change. Many of these policies are misguided and extreme. The example of prohibiting new construction in rural areas based on the wildfire threat is one of them. Another is the fast tracking of legislation aimed at achieving the 2030 targets for California’s aggregate greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the latest bits of pending legislation pursuant to California hitting its 2030 greenhouse gas emissions target is the intention to charge automobile owners based in their “vehicle miles traveled.” If one reflects on who will be impacted by a law of this sort, it is revealed as one of the most misanthropic, regressive laws ever proposed in California. The people who live on the outskirts of cities and have super-commutes, the people who are gone from 7 a.m. till 8 p.m. every day so they can keep their family under a roof, will now have to pay extra for the privilege of enduring that super-commute.

The equally misanthropic alternative that California’s climate activist legislators propose is to construct high density condominiums and apartments located by light rail stations and bus stops. These residences will have their parking requirements waived. Imagine, if you will, a parent of three, still barely able to pay rent, living without a car in one of these “transit villages.” Without a car, exactly how will they pick up their children from school, deposit them at soccer practice, do the dinner shopping, go home and drop off groceries, then pick them up from soccer practice, all while riding various buses? It’s impossible.

Ultimately, perhaps California’s wildfires, and the two very different responses they generate, are emblematic of the entire climate change debate. On one side you have the righteous climate activists, determined to save the planet at all costs. On the other you have working practitioners with expertise earned in the real world, with empathy for real people.

How will we look back at this era? How will history judge our responses to the challenges of our time, in 2123?

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.