Icecap Note:

California has had no downtrend in annual precipitation since 1895.

Enlarged

It’s tragic issues with wildfires the last two years are the result of radical governmental and environmental policies/inaction. The people in the path of these fast moving infernos and the brave firefighters trying to save lives and property are suffering because of bad state government and greed by large NGOs.

See more here.
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CA Gov. Jerry Brown Vetoed Bipartisan Wildfire Management Bill in 2016

Last year, as all Hell was breaking loose in California as residents were burned out of their homes, neighborhoods and businesses, Gov. Jerry Brown was jetting around the world spouting climate change propaganda, and calling this California’s ‘new normal.’

“With climate change, some scientists are saying Southern California is literally burning up, and burning up as maybe a metaphor or a description not just to the fires right here, but what we can expect over the next years and decades,” Brown said.

RELATED:

Nov. 13, 2018 - CA Gov. Jerry Brown Vetoed 2016 Wildfire Management Bill While CA Burned
Aug. 12, 2018- California Wildfires Caused By Radical Environmentalists, Not Climate Change
Aug. 6, 2018 - California burns: The “new normal” thanks to Obama Era Environmental Regulations
Aug. 9, 2018 - CA Gov. Jerry Brown Vetoed Bipartisan Wildfire Management Bill in 2016
July 9, 2018- Jerry Brown’s California: Socialist, Climate-Conscious Open Borders Utopia

Today, as California burns once again under torrential wildfires, many Californians have been asking why the dramatic increase in wildfires in the last five years… that is everyone except Governor Jerry Brown. Governor Brown claims that year-round, devastating fires are the “new normal” we must accept.

Megan Barth and I reported Monday:

“Supporting Obama-era regulations have resulted in the new normal: an endless and devastating fire season. Obama-era regulations introduced excessive layers of bureaucracy that blocked proper forest management and increased environmentalist litigation and cost - a result of far too many radical environmentalists, bureaucrats, Leftist politicians and judicial activists who would rather let forests burn, than let anyone thin out overgrown trees or let professional loggers harvest usable timber left from beetle infestation, or selectively cut timber.”

Mismanaged, overcrowded forests provide fuel to historic California wildfires, experts say. The 129 million dead trees throughout California’s forests are serving as matchsticks and kindling.

Jerry Brown, busy mulling ways to prevent the end of the world, took the Clinton and Obama-era gross regulations a step even further when he vetoed a bipartisan wildfire management bill in 2016.

At the request of the City Council of Laguna Beach, Sen. John Moorlach (R-Costa Mesa), authored SB 1463 in 2016, a bipartisan bill which would have given local governments more say in fire-prevention efforts through the Public Utilities Commission proceeding making maps of fire hazard areas around utility lines.

California fires produced as much pollution in 2 days as all the state’s cars do in a year

Laguna Beach went through four fires sparked by utility lines in the last ten years, and has done as much in the way of prevention as they could afford. The bill would have allowed cities to work with utilities to underground utility lines, and work with the Public Utilities Commission to develop updated fire maps by requiring the PUC to take into consideration areas in which communities are at risk from the consequences of wildfire, not just those areas where certain environmental hazards are present.

Moorlach’s bill came about when on February 2, 2016, the PUC served the final version of Fire Map 1, and the City of Laguna Beach was not placed within the low-risk margins of the Utility Fire Threat Index.

Gov. Brown vetoed SB 1463, despite being passed by the Legislature, 75-0 in the Assembly and 39-0 in the Senate. That tells you this was political. The Governor’s veto message did not properly address why he vetoed the bill. Brown claimed that the PUC and CalFire have already been doing what Moorlach’s bill sought to accomplish. How on earth could Brown kill this bill when the state was burning down?

“SB 1463 would have not only safeguarded Laguna and other high fire-risk communities in Orange County, but would have helped other vulnerable communities throughout the state that are often threatened by wildfires caused by sparks from shorted or fallen utility lines,” Sen. Moorlach said in a statement following the surprise veto. “The Governor’s veto impedes the necessity to more urgently address the California Public Utilities Commission’s focus on identifying high risk areas that should be prioritized for appropriate mitigation measures.”

California fires produced as much pollution in 2 days as all the state’s cars do in a year.

After SB 1463 was killed by Gov. Brown, Sen. Moorlach and his brilliant staff had an epiphany: Redirect the state’s accumulated cap-and-trade funds into wildfire prevention.

Authored in 2018, the new Senate Bill 1463, aptly named “Cap and Trees,” would continuously appropriate 25 percent of state cap-and-trade funds to counties to harden the state’s utility infrastructure and better manage wildlands and our overgrown and drought-weakened forests, Moorlach recently wrote in a San Francisco Chronicle op ed.

The idea was to actually reduce the state’s highest source of greenhouse gas emissions, curb the impacts of future wildfires and prevent unnecessary damage to life and property, the new SB 1463 fact sheet reported.

However, SB 1463 was killed in the radical Senate Environmental Quality Committee by Democrats, even though there was no opposition to it. The killing was purely political, with no regard given to the people of the state.

Cap and Trade was a scheme born out of the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, known as AB 32, which charged the California Air Resources Board with lowering greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. In addition, AB 32 requires the ARB to inventory GHG emissions in California, and approve statewide GHG emissions limits.

Sen. Moorlach’s second version of SB 1463 would also have required the California Air Resources Board to include greenhouse gas emissions from wildland and forest fires in their updated Scoping Plan. The ARB does not actually track GHGs - they just estimate. The ARB is extorting millions of dollars from California businesses on their best guesses.

It is estimated that “for every 2 to 3 days these wildfires burn, GHG emissions are roughly equal to the annual emissions from every car in the entire state of California,”

USA Today/Reno Gazette reported in 2017. Last year, there were more than 9,000 major wildfires which burned over 1.2 million acres. Several of the large fires were caused or exacerbated by sparking utility lines.

The problem is that the Air Resources Board Scoping Plan ignores the most egregious of all GHG emission problems - manmade wildfires. Instead, the ARB spends a substantial amount of cap and trade funds on high-speed rail, which literally increases GHG emissions and eliminates large carbon sinks. The ARB has a history of diverting funds to pet projects and programs that have little or nothing to do with actually reducing GHG emissions.

The Senate Environmental Quality Committee, responsible for killing Moorlach’s SB 1463, has a radical environmentalist/preservationist as the committee consultant. In the only bill analysis done on SB 1463, this is the drivel she wrote:

“...natural disasters that emit GHGs (such as wildfires) occurred before climate change, will continue to occur as the climate continues to change, and will persist even if mankind ultimately solves the problem of climate change.”

“While science can now conclusively attribute individual extreme events to climate change, it is important to distinguish that extreme events like the recent wildfires in California are a symptom of climate change, not the cause.”

“The overwhelming consensus of climate scientists is that climate change is anthropogenic, meaning human activity has caused the rising GHG concentrations in the atmosphere and, therefore, increasing average global temperatures and the extreme events climate change causes.”

“To include GHG emissions from natural disasters in the state’s inventory that tracks progress towards California’s climate goals, even ones that are made worse by climate change, betrays the fundamental scientific understanding that human activity is responsible for climate change.” (Her emphasis, not mine) 04/19/18- Senate Environmental Quality

Jerry Brown’s Exploitation of California Events

“There is no hope for the truth when world leaders like Governor Brown of California (he runs the 19th largest economy in the world) can present such utterly false information in pursuit of a political agenda,”

“Since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse and that’s the way it is.” - Jerry Brown

Jerry Brown’s Real Legacy

Remember when Gov. Jerry Brown said the world needs ‘brain washing’ on climate change. Sounding indeed brainwashed, Brown said, “The problem… is us. It’s our whole way of life. It’s our comfort… It’s the greed. It’s the indulgence. It’s the pattern. And it’s the inertia.”

Brown screeched in 2015 that California has an overpopulation problem, and the ongoing drought was proof that the explosion of population in California has reached the limit of what the states’ resources can provide. “We are altering this planet with this incredible power of science, technology and economic advance,” Brown told the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. “If California is going to have 50 million people, they’re not going to live the same way the native people lived, much less the way people do today...You have to find a more elegant way of relating to material things. You have to use them with greater sensitivity and sophistication.”

Brown has managed to divert the fawning, slobbering California media away from his actual responsibilities as California Governor, and instead has them focused on hysteria, doom, gloom, and intangibles like “climate change.”

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Marc Morano and Craig Rucker add:

California’s wildfires are a horrific tragedy. At last report 63 people are dead, 631 missing and 11,862 structures have been destroyed. We hold those lost and suffering in our thoughts and prayers.

Not unexpectedly, Governor Jerry Brown would have us believe the harm caused by California’s wildfires is the result of climate change. But that is false.

As CFACT’s Marc Morano explains through extensive coverage at Climate Depot, California’s rain and drought are historically normal.  In fact, the total U.S. acreage burned by wildfires is actually down in recent years.

That said, there are anthropogenic roots to this catastrophe. But they are not the human causal links Governor Brown points to.

Rapid population growth, extensive development, poor water management, and most critically, irresponsible forest management are principally to blame.

Green activists blocked forest clearing in the name of species protection, leaving California with 129 million dead trees, clogging 8.9 million acres.

If government actually wanted to promote the rapid and uncontrolled spread of deadly wildfires, it would be hard-pressed to find a better approach.  Once again the Greens find themselves on the wrong side of the implacable law of unintended consequences, as the very species they profess to care about, are incinerated before our eyes.

Governor Brown, if you are still searching for the anthropogenic link to California’s tragic fires, I expect somewhere in the governor’s mansion there’s probably be a mirror.

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California Gov. Brown Shirks Blame for Devastating Wildfires

Liberal California Gov. Jerry Brown has never been one to take personal responsibility. He has made a career out of blaming others for his and the failures of extreme left-wing policies.

It comes as no surprise that just one day after Pres. Donald J. Trump criticized the state for the gross forestry mismanagement linked to surging wildfires, Gov. Brown was quick to blame climate change and climate deniers.

“Managing all the forests in everywhere we can does not stop climate change. And those who deny that are definitely contributing to the tragedies that we’re now witnessing, and will continue to witness in the coming years,” Brown reportedly said. “We’re fighting nature with the amount of material we’re putting in the environment, and that material traps heat, and the heat fosters fires, and the fires keep burning.”

But it’s an inconvenient truth that Gov. Brown and his merry band of West Coast liberals have imposed radical environmental regulations that run contrary to appropriate forest management.

Pres. Trump has cited the Democrat laws designed to protect species such as the Spotted Owl that effectively ended the ability of loggers to clear-cut swaths of forests. Clear-cutting acted as a deterrent to wildfires spreading over vast areas because it cut off the fuel supply.

Under Pres. Clinton, old-growth trees were protected from logging and that effectively ended the timber industry’s ability to clear-cut in 1994. More far-left policies also ended grazing by cattle and other farmers.

“(Prior to 1994) mostly fuels were removed through logging, active management - which they stopped - and grazing,” Bob Zybach, a reforestation consultant with a Ph.D. in environmental science, reportedly said. “You take away logging, grazing, and maintenance, and you get firebombs.”

While these policies may have been well-intentioned, Democrats pushed through solutions that caused much greater problems. Now, those habitats and species they sought to protect are completely destroyed, thousands of Californians have been displaced and the death toll continues to rise.

In 2005, the Western Governors Association released a report that warned such policies would have dire consequences.

“Over time the fire-prone forests that were not thinned, burn in uncharacteristically destructive wildfires, and the resulting loss of forest carbon is much greater than would occur if the forest had been thinned before fire moved through,” the WGA reportedly stated. “In the long term, leaving forests overgrown and prone to unnaturally destructive wildfires means there will be significantly less biomass on the ground, and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

But these mostly Republican governors from cattle and farmland states were dismissed and no fact-based actions were taken to restore logging as an effective means of forest management.

But perhaps the larger problem with regards to wildfires is that the left-leaning media appears ready to come to Gov. Brown’s defense even while liberal journalists know he is dead wrong. A prime example is the New York Times that is changing its tune after they criticized the end of clear-cutting in 2012.

“The U.S. Forest Service estimates that more than 190 million acres of public land are at risk of catastrophic fires, including 60 percent our national forests. Too many trees, too much brush, and bureaucratic regulations and lawsuits filed by environmental extremists are to blame,” The New York Times stated in 2012. “Timber harvests have plunged more than 75 percent from 12 billion board feet per year to less than 4 billion board feet per year. The result: historically large ponderosa pines which grew in stands of 20 to 55 trees per acre now grow (and burn) in densities of 300 to 900 trees per acre.”

At the time the article was published, the NY Times stated that wildfire devastation escalated from 81,043 fires burning 1,329,704 acres in 1998 to 74,126 fires burning 8,711,367 acres in 2011. The NY Times attributed the incredible uptick in lost habitats to the failed policies started by Clinton and pushed further by radical liberals.

These days, the NY Times is simply trying to support any claim by any Democrat because the failed newspaper has zero interest in fact-based reporting. Rather than stand by its claims made six years ago, the NY Times trolls out a liberal writer to make an odd claim that Pres. Trump is somehow incorrect. A recent piece misleads by pointing readers to forest thinning rather than clear-cutting. Dead brush and twigs may be the root cause of a wildfire, but stopping a wildfire means cutting off its fuel supply. That fuel is trees, particularly pine trees.

“Researchers are attributing at least part of the difference to climate change because in a warming world vegetation dries out faster and burns more easily,” NY Times writer Kendra Pierre-Louis states.

The NY Times writer goes on to try and shift blame to the federal government, claiming the state of California doesn’t own much of the impacted land. Either naive or just “dishonest,” as the president often says of the publication, the regulations apply to state and federal agencies alike.

Liberals ended the most effective tool to stop wildfires - clear cutting - and bog down anyone who tries to take precautionary measures through proper forest management. Perhaps Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said it best.

“Every year we watch our forests burn, and every year there is a call for action,” Sec. Zinke reportedly said. “Yet, when action comes, and we try to thin forests of dead and dying timber, or we try to sustainably harvest timber from dense and fire-prone areas, we are attacked with frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods.”

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More and more people have left the squalor of the sanctuary cities and high property costs and taxes and move to beautiful wooded areas they put themselves in greater danger given the eco fanatics control.