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WSJ editors slam California’s climate change scapegoating, blaming failed government response to wildfires and Newsom’s budget cuts worsening the crisis.
Attempts to pin the catastrophic California wildfires on the bogeyman of “climate change” are a deflection from the real culprits, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote Monday. [emphasis, links added]
The climate left is desperately trying to “change the subject from the failure of the state and local government to contain the fires that often accompany Santa Ana winds,” the WSJ editors note.
The op-ed first dismantles the ridiculous claim that climate change somehow caused the conflagration and then shows how state and local governments, and Gov. Gavin Newsom in particular, have abdicated their important role of protecting California residents from wildfire.
For eco-lefties, “climate change explains wet and dry seasons, which follows the progressive line that climate change is responsible for every natural disaster except for perhaps earthquakes,” the essay observes. “In today’s climate orthodoxy, bad weather is always man-made.”
The editors proceed to reproduce a chart from the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment that shows precipitation in the state going back 130 or so years.
The chart does not show a trend but rather recurring wet and dry spells, with the latter being especially prevalent in the 1910s and 1920s “when carbon emissions were far less than they are today,” the editors explain.
While climate is ever-changing, “variable rain and snowfall patterns in California are to be expected,” the editors write, and fires “will occur as a result.”
“Rather than blame the climate for wildfires,” they suggest, “the obligation of public officials should be to prepare for them and, when they inevitably occur, mitigate the damage.”
This is, of course, precisely what California’s political leaders have failed to do, and appear determined to keep doing.
Gavin Newsom’s newly introduced budget “skimps on wildfire prevention while boosting spending on Medicaid, green energy, and payoffs to the teachers’ unions,” the essay states.
Despite a revenue windfall, the proposed California state budget “cuts the CAL FIRE’s ‘resource management’ program by half from 2023 to $466.5 million,” the op-ed reveals.
Meanwhile, none of the proposed new spending “will mitigate future fires, droughts or floods or have any impact on global temperatures,” the editors contend.
“Despite their fervent belief that climate change will have catastrophic consequences, Democrats in California perennially underinvest in water storage and land management,” they argue.
Then when fires, water shortages, or floods inevitably happen, “Democrats blame climate change as if there is nothing they could do about any of it,” they write, concluding that what the state really needs is “political climate change.”
Top image via CNN/YouTube screencap
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