President Joe Biden declared the Caldor Fire threatening communities at Lake Tahoe, California an emergency Wednesday night to dispatch federal resources to the relief effort.
That blaze, only 25 percent contained as of this writing, has already burned more than 200,000 acres with roughly 32,300 structures in the path of destruction, according to a local California news outlet.
Meanwhile, the Dixie Fire 120 miles north of the area scorched half of Lassen Volcanic National Park and remains only 52 percent contained.
Billed as one of the largest in modern California history, the inferno has already engulfed 1,300 structures and continues to spread, presenting a nightmare to the 12,000 people who live within a five-mile radius, as calculated by The New York Times.
The pair of mega wildfires mark another tragic summer on the heels of a record-setting season last year, in which more than 10 million acres burned in the highest yearly total since modern-day tracking began in 1983.
It’s not just that 10 million acres burned, but also that many acres burned as a consequence of high-intensity fires. The latter claimed more than 17,500 structures with damages totaling $16.5 billion, according to the Yale Center for Environmental Communication.
Last year’s fires ranked the third costliest on record, behind 2017 at $24 billion and 2018 at $22 billion.
None Of This Had To Happen
The apocalyptic carnage across California each year is entirely preventable. While Democrats perpetuate the manufactured narrative by legacy media that climate change is the sole culprit for this charred devastation, western states are burning primarily as a consequence of bad land management.
A quick examination of the map for nearly every major forest fire to make national headlines will reveal the deadly blazes either start or grow on federally mismanaged land.
“I don’t think you can call it a coincidence,” said Jonathan Wood, the vice president of policy and law at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), adding that two-thirds of fires start on federal property. “If it were one, maybe it would be a coincidence, but when you’ve got a series, you’ve got a trend.”
Wood told The Federalist the outbreak of current forest fires was entirely predictable, raising alarm in a report published in April that the U.S. Forest Service confronted a backlog of 63 million acres with a “high risk or very high risk of wildfire” and another 80 million acres in need of restoration.
The build-up of fuel to follow 100 years of fire suppression has led to the creation of massive tinderboxes ripe to go up in the conflagrations seen today.
According to ProPublica, between four and 12 million acres were burned in prehistoric California every year. Between 1989 and 1998, however, state bureaucrats only burned an average of 30,000 acres a year. That number fell to 13,000 acres between 1999 and 2017.
Yet the Forest Service remains behind, now devoting resources to immediate crises presented by the fires of today as opposed to preventing the fires of tomorrow with thinning and prescribed burns.
That includes selective forest logging and low-intensity fires to reduce excess wood fuel. According to Wood’s report, co-authored with PERC Research Fellow Holly Fretwell, the Forest Service only has plans for fuel reduction projects dealing with 1.4 million acres per year.
“At that pace, it would take decades to treat the areas at risk of catastrophic fire,” they wrote.
In his interview with The Federalist, Wood agreed climate change was in part to blame for the accelerating growth of wildfires but emphasized proper land management that addressed fuel reduction was the “only realistic way” to deal with what’s become routine crises.
Several studies have also discounted the importance of climate change in the intensity of wildfires gripping western states.
In one paper cited by Wood and Fretwell, a team of researchers who examined four factors in wildfire severity found live fuel “was the most important” in contributing to fire growth, with 53 percent of relative influence as opposed to climate change at 14 percent. Fire weather was rated with a 23 percent average relative influence and topography with 10 percent.
Another study authored by a team of scientists from the Conservation Biology Institute, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the University of California Los Angeles concluded human presence diminished the importance of climate in the growth of wildfires.
“In regions where human presence is more important, the importance of climate is lower on average,” they wrote. “This suggests that not only can humans influence fire regimes, as has been documented, but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effect of climate.”
Michael Shellenberger, the president of Environmental Progress and author of “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” called this year’s mega-wildfires burning California “100 percent” preventable if adequate prescribed burns and trimming around powerlines had been conducted by government land managers.
Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom however, who faces a recall election in less than two weeks, cut the state’s budget for wildfire prevention and resource management from $355 million in 2019 to $203 million last year, a more than 40 percent decrease.
“Everybody knew we were going to have them,” Shellenberger told The Federalist of this year’s fires. He went on to place greater blame on negligent land management than on climate change.
“Climate change causes warmer temperatures. Warmer temperatures mean that more of the year is warmer, so it extends the fire season,” Shellenberger explained but qualified the statement with, “high fuel load is a necessary and sufficient cause of high-intensity fires. Climate change is neither necessary nor a sufficient cause.”
In other words, while climate change may extend the fire season, high fuel loads in the nation’s forests are the culprit for the eruption of fires of this size. And negligent land management made that happen.
Read more at The Federalist
It’s all very well claiming that most of the fires are on Federal land, but you neglected to mention that Gavin Newsom actually sued the Feds to prevent forest clean up & fire mitigation work on Federal land in California.
I lived in the San Diego area, 2001-2004. In fall 2003 there was a huge fire that burned across 50 miles virtually overnight from Julian to Miramar base. Then the largest fire in California to date in terms of area burned and number 2 in number of houses destroyed. I noted that during this period that Mexico (Baja California Alto, -just across the border) did not seem to have these episodic catastrophic events. Seems that in Mexico they just dont fight the fires. The fires occur frequently, dont burn much (not much to burn), and are simply left to burn themselves out with efforts concentrated on protecting structures. The open land just burns without intervention. Result…no big fires.
The same problem exists in Australia where governments declare national parks, then lock the land up and do nothing to it for decades. These massive national parks are set aside to save the natural environment according to green activists. They are also time bombs for extremely hot fires in summer. when there is no chance to stop them when they get started by lightening or arsonists.
The outcome is completely predictable just like the Canberra fire in 2003. That happened because cool winter burning in the Brindabella Mountains to the west of Canberra was stopped in the name of conservation during the late 1980’s. Five hundred homes were lost and four people died. The Stromlo Observatory was burnt out along with hundreds of acres of pine forests most of which were ready for harvesting.
On the lower south coast of NSW, the situation was the same in 2019/20 when a number of small coastal villages were burnt out and holiday makers were trapped in Batemans Bay because all roads in and out were closed by the fires. Forests all along that part of the south coast hadn’t been burnt for over 20 years. Large trees were overhanging the main highway, it was that dense.
The outcome was predictable while nothing was done to thin the scrub and many people paid a high price as a result. Needless to say, no politician lost a house in this disaster.
We have some fires in our area and their producing Smoke way too much smoke and at times its just plain a hazard to go out in some areas.And frankly they should put the Eco-Freaks on them if they want to learn some responsility let them help douse the fires