Guest essay by Larry Hamlin

Right on cue the L. A. Times attempts to hide the incredible failures of the Democratic Party’s long standing energy and environmental policies in Sacramento that have led to the states wildfire debacle and energy blackouts and instead falsely blames these huge problems on vague “climate change” propaganda assertions that are unsupported by scientific data.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal exposed the monumentally misguided priorities of the state’s Democratic Party in wasting tens of billions of dollars on politically driven climate change propaganda schemes that have led to California’s energy and wildfire debacle.

The state has failed to deal with the real problems that have to be addressed that are desperately needed to undo this Democrat driven politically created catastrophe.

As usual the Times editorial makes no mention of the comprehensive analysis done by California’s Legislative Analyst Office last year which clearly laid out the long standing failures of policy by the state that have led to the present debacle.

A detailed summary of this comprehensive report was provided in a prior WUWT article noted below.

The state’s report lays clear blame for California’s wildfire debacle on long standing failures by numerous agencies for failing to take necessary actions to deal with the significant deterioration of forest health.

Representative of these failures and symbolizing the conditions in many other areas were the huge reductions in properly clearing excessive tree crowded forest areas with these failures extending over many decades. These neglected actions were needed to preserve and maintain long-term forest health. These failures are portrayed in the reports graph shown below.

The report notes these same deleterious conditions occurred in other forest management areas including failures to clear excessive undergrowth, remove dead and diseased trees, use prescribed burns effectively, etc.

The significant increase in numbers and severity of wildfires over the last several decades directly follow these patterns of failed actions as addressed above with these outcomes shown in the report graph presented below.

The Times editorial assertion that “climate change” is responsible for the state’s wildfire debacle is unsupported by the comprehensive and detailed analysis contained in the state’s report on California’s extensive forest management failures.

As addressed in another article at WUWT even for the state to begin to take small actions earlier this year to address the long standing and huge backlog of forest problems Gov. Newsom had to declare a state of emergency so that environmental activists would not delay for years or completely preclude these small steps from going forward.

Environmental activists have used California’s excessive number of environmental laws and regulations to preclude, delay or make too expensive actions needed to maintain and preserve forest health thus necessitating Gov. Newsom’s declaration of a state of emergency.

The Times editorial does not address the scientific evidence clearly indicating that the long existing drought behavior of the American west is driven by natural climate behavior versus some nebulous propaganda hyped claim of “climate change”.

An extensive study published in ScienceDirect addressed the North American drought history going back to year 800 using tree ring data. The study noted the following regarding the long term climate behavior of drought and precipitation in the West:

“Severe drought is the greatest recurring natural disaster to strike North America. A remarkable network of centuries-long annual tree-ring chronologies has now allowed for the reconstruction of past drought over North America covering the past 1000 or more years in most regions. These reconstructions reveal the occurrence of past “megadroughts” of unprecedented severity and duration, ones that have never been experienced by modern societies in North America. There is strong archaeological evidence for the destabilizing influence of these past droughts on advanced agricultural societies, examples that should resonate today given the increasing vulnerability of modern water-based systems to relatively short-term droughts.”

The Times editorial completely ignores the colossal irrelevance of the state’s costly, misguided and totally meaningless climate alarmist propaganda program to reduce its emissions with such reductions having no impact whatsoever on a global scale as addressed in yet another WUWT article.

Compared to a few hundred million tons of CO2 emissions that the state is trying to reduce by 2030 the world’s developing nations have already increased such emissions by over 4.5 billion metric tons during the last decade and are forecast to increase future CO2 emissions by an additional more than 7.7 billion metric tons by year 2050 according to the latest EIA data and forecasts.

Yet California Democrats are committing tens of billions of dollars for nothing but meaningless climate alarmist political propaganda while allowing the state to burn uncontrollably because of their misguided and incompetent priorities.

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