“I don't think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore,” said President Joe Biden while touring the damage caused by Hurricane Idalia in Florida last weekend. “Just look around,” he urged. “Historic floods. I mean, historic floods. More intense droughts, extreme heat, significant wildfires have caused significant damage,” Biden continued in his attempt to blame natural disasters on the “climate crisis.” Biden's claims might be a politically expedient excuse, but it's just that: an excuse to cover for what is often mismanagement by Democrat leaders.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, rightfully so, rebutted Biden’s claims. “The notion that somehow hurricanes are something new, that’s just false,” he pointed out. “We’ve got to stop politicizing the weather and stop politicizing natural disasters,” he urged of those on the other side of the aisle who use natural disasters to underscore their climate alarmism which naturally turns into attacks on Republican leaders who refuse to enact restrictions on reliable and affordable energy and know it’s a fool’s errand to try spending their way out of the path of severe weather. “We know from history there’s been times when it’s very busy in Florida, late ‘40s, early ‘50s, you had a lot of hits of significant hurricanes,” DeSantis reminded.
But beyond using the “climate crisis” as a bludgeon with which to attack Republicans, Democrats’ use of such buzzwords is also an attempt to cover for Democrat mismanagement of natural resources, utilities, and tools at their disposal.
As we learned in the aftermath of the devastating Maui fires, there were years of warnings about wildfire danger that went ignored or unaddressed. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hawaiian Electric knew since 2019 that it “needed to do far more to prevent its power lines from emitting sparks,” yet that threat was not properly mitigated because, “politically, the focus was on electricity generation.” As summarized by Michael Shellenberger, “what caused the fires was Hawaiian Electric’s failure to clear flammable grasses from around electric wires because its focus, and ratepayer money, was going to renewables.”
That is, it wasn’t a fire caused by a radically changing climate, it was mismanagement caused, at least in part, due to prioritizing the demands of climate alarmists that saw resources used in pursuit of renewable energy instead of safeguarding power transmission infrastructure. In the end, hundreds of people died and even more, many of them children, are still “missing.”
The tragic events in Maui are hardly the first instance of Democrats attempting to use a “climate crisis” to paper over their own failures to manage natural resources.
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom took office in 2019 declaring “everybody has had enough” with wildfires in the Golden State, citing climate change as the culprit but pledging to “fundamentally” change the way California responded to such infernos.
But, just more than two years after taking office, an investigation conducted by the Sacramento National Public Radio affiliate CapRadio found that Newsom had botched the whole plan and failed to deliver on his promises — even going so far as to lie about how much work California had undertaken while cutting wildfire prevention spending.
According to CapRadio’s report on its investigation, “the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention” and “overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. Newsom has claimed that 35 ‘priority projects’ carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres,” CapRadio recounted. “But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399.”
Meanwhile, after Newsom promised to do better managing California’s natural resources but failed to do so, cut prevention efforts, and lied about how much he was doing, “4.3 million acres burned” in 2020, “the most in California’s recorded history,” according to CapRadio. “That was more than double the previous record, set in 2018, when the Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise, killing 85 people.”
So after Newsom took office in January 2019 and pledged to better manage forests and focus on wildfire prevention, he proceeded to mismanage the state’s wild lands so dramatically that by 2020 the Golden State saw the most acres burned — ever.
That statistic, of course, was and has been used to show how the “climate crisis” is making conditions worse and triggering record-setting blazes. But why is it blamed on something supposedly out of control while there’s no serious discussion about how Newsom mismanaged — and tried to cover up — the vital work of managing California’s forests and wild lands?
Since then, Newsom has continued to chalk wildfires up to climate change, even though he’s been found to have been negligent in keeping his promise to adequately manage California’s natural resources.
Newsom’s use of climate alarmism is just another ploy to skirt blame or accountability for his failures, and people shouldn’t take Democrat demands for radical climate policies seriously until they’ve proven some ability to do the immediate and tangible things that can prevent fires and slow their spread.
Just as Democrat climate alarmists often foolishly reject expanding nuclear power generation in their demands to “decarbonise” the energy sector, refusing to take logical actions such as active land management render their hooting and hollering unserious at best.