Utopian Greenism Is Destroying the Planet

Don’t Blame Climate Change For Raging Wildfires

Blame Bad Management


Despite common sense, the historic record, and scientific evidence, leftist environmentalists would fight and protest for a utopia we will never see, all while the world burns.

Krystina Skurk
The Federalist


California and Australia share a common enemy: overzealous environmental regulation. In both places, the unintended consequences of a radical environmentalist agenda has been massive wildfires.

California suffered from two horrible fire seasons in the last three years, one of which burned down an entire town. Australia has been battling fires for months. More than 135 fires are still burning currently. So far, the fires have scorched 12 million acres, killed 25 people, caused 240,000 Australians to evacuate their homes, burned alive an estimated half a billion animals, and caused $3.4 billion worth of damage.

The big question isn’t necessarily how these wildfires started. In both cases, most of the fires were likely man-made, whether through downed electrical lines in California or arsonists in Australia. The real question, however, is what factors have contributed to making these fires into “mega catastrophes,” or fires that cause over a billion dollars of damage?

Many on the left will name climate change as the bogeyman. For example, a recent opinion article in The New York Times reads, “Australia Is Committing Climate Suicide.” Yet more evidence points to failed environmental policies.

This isn’t to say weather or climate doesn’t create dangerous fire conditions. Droughts create drier conditions, and hot air worsens wildfires, but there is even contention over the supposition that Australia is hotter and drier now than in the past. One researcher argues that, with a few exceptions, most of Australia has become wetter since 1910.

Rapid, Turbo-Charged Decline

Is California Becoming Premodern?

Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online


California is nearing the logical limits of progressive adventurism in policy and politics.
More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric — which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year — preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so over-regulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases. Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline, and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon — the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation, and green mandates — add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.

Residents shrug that the state’s public schools are among weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools but often put their own kids in private academies.

Blame the Greenist Bureaucrats

Forest Mismanagement Causing California's Wildfire Catastrophes

We have been regaled with  story after story about California wild fires.  The pre-programmed idiots intone, "global warming, global warming, global warming . . . " mindlessly, as they have been taught to do.  But the causes and effects of the fires have a more prosaic and sinister cause: human error.

When President Trump publicly blamed the poor forest management, he was ridiculed.  But there is plenty of evidence that his criticisms get close to the bulls-eye.    Krystina Skurk explains why:

How Misguided Environmentalism Is To Blame For California’s Wildfires

The saddest part about these fires in California is that they are self inflicted. Californians should not allow such mismanagement to continue.

Krystina Skurk
The Federalist


I grew up in California’s Ventura County and have family in both southern and northern California. Right now, the most deadly fire in California’s history is racing across northern California. The Camp Fire has already killed at least 56 people, burned down 7,700 homes, and destroyed the entire town of Paradise. A brush fire is also wreaking havoc on southern California. The Woolsey Fire has destroyed 98,362 acres, killed two people, and damaged several Hollywood landmarks such as the set of “MASH” and the Reagan Ranch.

Article after article blames two things for California’s frequent fires: global warming and human action. For example, a BuzzFeed article is titled, “How A Booming Population And Climate Change Made California’s Wildfires Worse Than Ever.” While dry conditions make fires more likely and people often start them, this misses the big picture. President Trump summed it up on Nov 10. He wrote, “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor … Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Trump is right. Mismanagement and overregulation deserve most of the blame, but he should keep in mind that the federal government owns 57 percent of California forest land. This mismanagement is also not a result of  a lack of care. Believe me, Californians care. . . .

The federal government owns 45.8 percent of California’s land, while 4 percent is owned by the state and 51 percent is privately owned. CAL FIRE manages both state and private land. Part of the reason it is so difficult to manage California forests is the bureaucratic milieu. The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of land, has 28,000 employees, and has an annual outlay of $7 billion a year, according to a 2017 Analytical Perspective from the budget of the U.S. government.

For decades, environmental protection schemes have usurped common sense. For example, most fire ecologists say that the surest way of preventing massive forest fires is to use prescribed burns. The California Environmental Protection Agency states that “prescribed burning is the intentional use of fire to reduce wildfire hazards, clear downed trees, control plant diseases, improve rangeland and wildlife habitats, and restore natural ecosystems.”

Prescribed burns keep forests healthy by burning up the underbrush that accumulates on the forest floor and by thinning trees. Yet for decades the Forest Service has suppressed most fires. According to a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection executive summary: “Land and fire management have in many cases increased fire hazard. In some shrub types, fire suppression appears to have shifted the fire regime away from more, smaller fires toward fewer, larger fire.”

Despite scientific evidence, the federal government continues spending more money on fire suppression than prescribed burns. The Forest Service has performed prescribed burns on an average of 2,187,64 2 acres a year for the past ten years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

This means the Forest Service has only performed prescribed burns on 11.3 percent of the land they manage. When explaining to Mother Jones why the California Wine Country fires were so bad last October, fire ecologist Sasha Berleman said, “We have 100 years of fire suppression that has led to this huge accumulation of fuel loads.”

History Curiously Repeats

California Seeks Effective Secession From the Union

Life has a tendency to throw up some unexpected turn of events.  Or, as the saying has it, beware unintended consequences.  

The American Civil War was fought over the principle of States' rights.  The fundamental question was how much original authority resided in the states versus how much resided in the Federal government.  Did the Federal government hold a higher authority than the states when it came to managing their own affairs?  The signature issue at the time was slavery.  The Civil War "answered" the question: federalism triumphed over states' rights--by force of arms.

In recent years we have seen the re-emergence of the doctrine of states' rights, however.  It has come from an unexpected quarter.  Cities (and states) in the US have begun to assert a "sanctuary status" for illegal aliens, which means that they refuse to support or comply with Federal Government law on immigrants.  Leading the charge for this recrudescence of doctrines of states' rights has been California, one of the most "liberal" States in the union.

Californication: A Thing to Behold

Purer Than The Driven Snow

There is an old saw to the effect that when the law becomes an ass, only donkeys comply.  And so it rolls.  In California, cow farts are now subject to law.

In California’s consistent quest to put the plug in global warming, the Smurf-blue state has turned its attention to dairy cow derrieres, and the gasses said bovine backsides issue forth.

According to Fox 5 in New York, California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation into law that will limit the methane gas rising from farms created by the cows belching, farting, and manure. Methane is a much more unfriendly greenhouse gas than carbon-dioxide, and while some would celebrate this as another step toward curbing global warming, the law was signed in the face of much protest by California farmers.  [TheBlaze]

Just exactly how, we innocently inquire, will the great Wizard of Oz and his lawmakers limit the amount of bovine excrescence in California?

A Man-Made Disaster

California's Drought

Carly Fiorina describes how the worst ever drought in California is due to the ignorance of the pagan natives.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said Monday that California’s water crisis is the result of “liberal environmentalists” who are “willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology.”

“With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could be avoided,” Fiorina said on Glenn Beck’s radio program. “Despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled.”  Fiorina said that as a result, 70 percent of California’s rainfall “washes out to sea” year after year. . . .

“In California, fish and frogs and flies are really important — far more important apparently than the 40 percent unemployment rate in certain parts of central valley,” Fiorina said. “So the Senate and the president could waive some of those water restrictions. They have been asked to do so, and they have refused to do so.”  [TheBlaze]

Depravity Without Bounds

Planned Parenthood: Kill Amendments to Ban Sex-Selection Abortions

by Dr. Susan Berry  

17 Jun 2014

Breitbart News

Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California have issued a floor alert to members of the California legislature urging lawmakers to defeat all pro-life amendments to budget bills, including any that ban sex-selection abortions or require parental consent for minors to obtain an abortion.

The memo to California lawmakers, dated June 12, speaks on behalf of more than 110 Planned Parenthood facilities in the state and declares California to be a “pro-choice state,” based on a Field Poll from four years ago which they claim found 71 percent of Californians opposed to any further restrictions on abortion.

In addition, the Planned Parenthood affiliates' memo states that any amendments that could restrict abortion are “hostile” to “choice,” and it threatens that lawmakers who vote “on any budget amendments to restrict abortion access may be included on the PPAC Legislative Scorecard.”

To justify their demands upon lawmakers, the Planned Parenthood affiliates cite:

The Pillage of Progressive Government

Evasive Action Increasing

It's a hard lesson to learn, but sooner or later even the antediluvians amongst us will begin to comprehend.  Point #1: Capital and labour are the core components of any commercial enterprise.  Point #2: Capital and labour are mobile.

Now this has not always been the case.  Before the development of technologies that can move people relatively quickly and inexpensively from one side of the globe to the other, labour was relatively immobile.  In a particular area, the number of jobs were necessarily limited; in times of recession, sometimes severely limited.  That meant that employees were effectively reduced to being "price takers".  They had little economic leverage to increase wages.  The number of employment opportunities was small or fixed; there was often surplus labour chasing those jobs.

Now, labour is globally mobile--more so than at any time hitherto in our age.

The Californication of the US

It's the Debt, Stupid

"a brothel of environmentalists, lawyers, public-sector unions and legislative bums." Wall Street Journal

Sarah Palin congratulates Romney on Ryan

 This from Sarah Palin on the announcement of Paul Ryan as Romney's running mate:

Congratulations to Mitt Romney on his choice of Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate. 

President Obama has declared that this election is about "two fundamentally different visions" for America. Goodness, he's got that right. Our country cannot afford four more years of Barack Obama's fundamentally flawed vision. We must now look to this new team, the Romney/Ryan ticket, to provide an alternate vision of an America that is fiscally responsible, strong, and prosperous--an America that understands and is proud of her exceptional place in the world and will respect those who fight to secure that exceptionalism, which includes keeping our promises to our veterans.

When I think about the direction our country is rapidly drifting in, I can't help but look at California as a cautionary tale.

Comatose California

California is in terminal decline.  Its malignant cancers were sixty years in the making.  It has degenerated to the stage of hospice care. 

We believe the case of Californian (once the eighth largest economy in the world) is salutary.  It has much to teach us, assuming we are prepared to learn. 

We need to begin sixty years ago, when the notion of Californian exceptionalism was first mooted.  California was to be the model of successful progressive modern government.  It was the harbinger of the future.  It was to lead the other 49 states of the Union to a higher secular humanist plane.
 

In 1949, Carey McWilliams, the state’s greatest journalist, called California “the great exception” among states: no textbook or precedent existed to explain its monstrous growth, its powerful labor movement, its superb education system, or its abundance-creating, super-exploitative farm system. “California has not grown or evolved,” McWilliams wrote, “so much as it has been hurtled forward, rocket-fashion, by a series of chain-reaction explosions.” . . .

California’s reputation for being irredeemably liberal began to take hold in the ’60s, when three groups, all in frequent conflict with each other, held sway over the image of the state: liberal administrators, students, and labor. The last of these, relatively powerful ever since the Gold Rush, had developed its strength to the point that corporations tended to submit to its demands, and often suffered grievously when they did not. Professional administrators and politicians meanwhile sought to expand the public realm in prosperous California by any means necessary: agriculture would be heavily industrialized to feed the poor with cheap produce; under the auspices of a “Master Plan” for education, universities would be turned into tuition-free “multiversities”; cities would have their slums cleared for arenas, entertainment complexes, and mega-housing projects. Students, many of whom had served as Freedom Riders in the South, first demanded free speech rights, and then used these rights to demand others.

California was the Golden State.  Progressive secular humanism would deliver the gold.  Forever. 

Now, progressivism has proved to be a malignant tumour.  There is no cure, no respite.  Only a long, slow lingering demise.  Steve Rhodes, the writer of the piece cited above, ends by referring to a recent congress he had attended in San Francisco, convened to try to find some cure for the malignancy.  The congress, he reports, was full of hippie hope, of palliative care only.  He concludes:

In a more sober moment — it came with the first chill blast of Pacific wind — I realized that the congress had seen the future of California and shuddered; that its platform comprised a message to San Francisco, the only message the city was really prepared to receive: Save yourselves.

Why has this happened?  As Lady Thatcher said, all socialist regimes end up the same way.  Eventually they run out of other people's money.  And then they die.  Society cannot be built upon a foundation of theft, greed and envy.  Progressive secular humanism has no other foundation.  Eventually, secular humanism will die out.  The pain and cost of its passing will be enormous, but terminate it will, one way or the other.

Here is a summary of the attending doctor's report, after visiting the hospice: 

February 10, 2011 12:00

Jerry Brown, a Modern Sisyphus
The new governor must change his state’s philosophy.

California’s new governor, Jerry Brown, must rapidly close a $25 billion budgetary shortfall. Right now it seems almost a hopeless task, since the state’s disastrous budget is merely a symptom, not the cause, of California’s much larger problems.

Take unemployment. It currently runs at 12.6 percent in California, the second-highest in the nation. Take livability. A recent Forbes magazine survey listing the 20 most miserable cities in the nation ranked four California municipalities in the top five.

Take education. California public schools test near rock bottom in national math and science scores. Take the business climate. A recent survey conducted among CEOs ranked California dead last for jobs and business growth.

Take taxes. California has the highest gasoline tax in the nation, and its combined sales-tax and local and state income-tax rates are among the nation’s steepest. California incarcerates the highest number of prisoners in the nation. It costs nearly $50,000 per year to house each one, near the highest per capita cost in the country.

I could go on, but you get the picture: The newly inaugurated Brown has problems well beyond a massive budget shortfall.

Perhaps the state’s problems are not of its own making but arise from a deficit of natural riches? Hardly. California has the most fertile soil and the climate most conducive to farming in the country. Tourists flock to see the beauty of Yosemite, Death Valley, and a 1,000-mile coastline. San Diego and San Francisco Bay are among the most naturally endowed harbors in the world. The state is rich in gas, oil, minerals, and timber. It has the largest population in the nation at 37 million residents. . . .

California uses more gasoline than any other state and has the most voracious appetite for electricity. But Californians also enact the most obstacles to developing their own sources of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. State referenda and the legislature have made it the hardest state in the nation in which to raise taxes and the easiest in which to pass costly new laws.

The state’s mineral and timber industries are nearly moribund. At a time of skyrocketing food prices, more than a quarter-million acres of some of the wealthiest agricultural land in California’s Central Valley lie idle due to court-driven irrigation cutoffs — costing thousands of jobs and robbing the state of millions of dollars in revenue.

Home prices stay prohibitive along the upscale coastal corridor from San Francisco to San Diego, even as millions of acres of open spaces there remain off-limits for new housing construction. Most refined Californians who regulate how the state’s natural resources are used live on the coast far away from — and do not always understand — those earthy people who struggle to develop them.

California does not ask its millions of foreign immigrants to arrive with legal status, the ability to speak English, or high-school diplomas, and then is confused when its entitlement and legal costs skyrocket. Billions of dollars in remittances are sent from California to Mexico — but without the state being curious whether some of the remitters are on some sort of state-funded public assistance.

Somehow, Jerry Brown must not only change the way Californians act, but also the strange way they now seem to think — persuading the present generation to produce far more private wealth while consuming far less in public funds. Otherwise, the revenue-strapped and reform-minded governor will be little more than a modern Sisyphus — endlessly pushing his enormous rock uphill, never quite reaching the top.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Terminal is what it is.