Environmentalist Policies Are Exacerbating Wildfires. It’s Time to Rethink Forest Management

Massive wildfires continue to rage out of control in Northern California, causing historic loss of life and billions of dollars in damage.

The images coming out of California towns, which look like bombed-out cities from World War II, are a sobering reminder of man’s occasional futility in the face of nature unleashed.

Stopping these huge blazes is, of course, a priority. The firefighters who have been battling these infernos have at times done a miraculous job under extremely difficult circumstances.

However, policymakers should also look at ways to curtail the long-term trend of growing numbers of major wildfires. While some argue that climate change is to blame for the uptick in fires, it’s also worth grappling with the drastic alterations in forest management that have occurred over the last four decades.

Many have argued that this is driving the surge in huge fires.

As a Reason Foundation study noted, the U.S. Forest Service, which is tasked with managing public wildland, once had success in minimizing widespread fires in the early 20th century.

But many of these successful methods were abandoned in large part because of efforts by environmental activists.

The Forest Service became more costly and less effective as it increasingly “rewarded forest managers for losing money on environmentally questionable practices,” wrote Randal O’Toole, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

Spending on the Forest Service has risen drastically, but these additional resources have been misused and haven’t solved the underlying issues.

“Fire expenditures have grown from less than 15 percent of the Forest Service budget in [the] early 1990s to about 50 percent today. Forest Service fire expenditures have increased from less than $1 billion in the late 1990s to $3.5 billion in 2016,” O’Toole wrote.

Perhaps now, Americans will begin to re-evaluate forest management policies.

In a May congressional hearing, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., said, “Forty-five years ago, we began imposing laws that have made the management of our forests all but impossible.”

He went on to say that federal authorities have done a poor job of implementing methods to reduce the number of deadly fires, and that this has been devastating for America’s wildlands.

“Time and again, we see vivid boundaries between the young, healthy, growing forests managed by state, local, and private landholders, and the choked, dying, or burned federal forests,” McClintock said. “The laws of the past 45 years have not only failed to protect the forest environment—they have done immeasurable harm to our forests.”

In a recent House address, McClintock pinned the blame of poor forest management on bad 1970s laws, like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. He said these laws “have resulted in endlessly time-consuming and cost-prohibitive restrictions and requirements that have made the scientific management of our forests virtually impossible.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has promoted a change to forest management policies, calling for a more aggressive approach to reduce the excess vegetation that has made the fires worse.

Congress is also moving to address the problem.

Members of the Western Caucus have proposed legislation to dramatically change the way forests are managed. If passed, this bill would give power back to local authorities and allow for more aggressive forest thinning without subjecting them to the most onerous of environmental reviews.

While state and federal governments can take measures to enhance forest and wilderness management, private management can also get involved to improve conditions.

One idea is to adopt a policy popularized by the school choice movement: create charter forests that are publicly owned, but privately managed. This would allow forest management to move away from top-down, bureaucratic control to a decentralized and varied system that may better conform with local realities.

As professor Robert H. Nelson wrote for The Wall Street Journal, the charter forest “would be exempt from current requirements for public land-use planning and the writing of environmental impact statements. These requirements long ago ceased to perform their ostensible function of improving public land decision making.”

Similar privatizing efforts have succeeded in the past.

No measure can truly prevent all fires, but reasonable steps can be taken to reduce the incidence of huge blazes like the ones currently engulfing California.

It’s time for lawmakers to redouble their efforts to protect American lives and property from nature’s most devastating ravages.

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Global Warming Hypocrites: Their Carbon Footprint Is OK, But Yours Must Be Eliminated

Scientists, identified as "conservation scientists" who presumably oppose human greenhouse gas emissions, have looked into their own lifestyles, as well as the lifestyles of other "conservation scientists," and found that they are preaching one thing while practicing another.

"Most" of these scientists, the British Telegraph reports, "have a carbon footprint which is virtually no different to anyone else." Those are the findings of a new study from Cambridge University published by researchers who were "were keen to find out whether being fully informed about global warming, plastic in the ocean or the environmental impact of eating meat, triggers more ethical behavior."

What they found was "conservation scientists," 300 of them, "still flew frequently — an average of nine flights a year — ate meat or fish approximately five times a week and rarely purchased carbon offsets for their own emissions."

"They were also less green in traveling to work than medics, and kept more dogs and cats. A recent study suggested pets are a hefty ecological burden. It takes more than two acres of grazing pasture to keep a medium-sized dog fed with meat, while the eco-footprint of a cat is similar to a Volkswagen Golf."

The study's lead author, Andrew Balmford, a professor of conservation science at Cambridge, said that "as conservationists we must do a great deal more to lead by example."

Do not be surprised by the duplicity. It's been noticed that the global warming alarmists who run their mouths the most are also running a lot of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We can start with Leonardo DiCaprio, who earns a fabulous living playing a child's game — that is, he pretends to be someone else, a behavior that most of us outgrow as adults.

But he doesn't have to fake being a hypocrite. That's his real life. Type "leonardo dicaprio climate hypocrite" into a web search engine. The results flow like the exhaust from one of the jets he flies all over the world — he reportedly even made a two-day turnaround trip from France to New York so he could receive a "green" award — to lecture his inferiors about their greenhouse gas emissions. He also lays about on luxury yachts that have neither oars nor solar panels but internal-combustion engines that spew carbon dioxide.

"It can be estimated that DiCaprio has potentially emitted up to 418.4 tons of CO2 this year because of his globe-trotting. The average American emits 19 tons a year," the Daily Mail reported last year.

And, as has been said here before, he once "celebrated New Year's Eve on a yacht in the Sydney Harbor, then flew with his pals to Las Vegas to ring in the New Year a second time."

Yet DiCaprio deigns, quite eagerly, we'd say, to preach to the masses, even using the pulpit of the United Nations to badger everyday people about their carbon footprint.

There's also ubernag Al Gore, who, like DiCaprio, jets around the world to instruct the peasants on the proper way to live while spreading a massive carbon footprint on his own. And never forget his Tennessee mansion, which devours electricity at a rate that is "more than 21.3 times that of the U.S. household average," says the Daily Signal.

Put another way, in a single month last year, "Gore's home consumed more electricity than the average family uses in 34 months."

The list of climate hypocrites is actually extensive and must include Prince Charles, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, United Nations nabobs, and, well, just about every Westerner who hectors others about their carbon footprint. Some are bigger hypocrites than others, of course. But hypocrisy smells of corruption no matter who is oozing it. It's even worse when the lesson the hypocrites are trying to teach is useless.

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EPA head seeks to avoid settlements with green groups

The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a directive to his agency on Monday seeking to end the practice of settling lawsuits with environmental groups behind closed doors, saying the groups have had too much influence on regulation.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who sued the agency he now runs more than a dozen times in his former job as attorney general of oil producing Oklahoma, has long railed against the so-called practice of "sue and settle." The EPA under former President Barack Obama quietly settled lawsuits from environmental groups with little input from regulated entities, such as power plants, and state governments, he argues.

The directive seeks to make EPA more transparent about lawsuits by reaching out to states and industry that could be affected by settlements, forbidding the practice of entering into settlements that exceed the authority of courts, and excluding attorney's fees and litigation costs when settling with groups.

Most lawsuits by green groups on the agency seek to push the agency to speed up regulation on issues such as climate and air and water pollution, studies have shown.

"The days of regulation through litigation are over," Pruitt said. "We will no longer go behind closed doors and use consent decrees and settlement agreements to resolve lawsuits filed against the agency."

Pruitt's order was supported by conservative groups.

Daren Bakst, a research fellow in agricultural policy at the Heritage Foundation think tank, said sue and settle has led to "egregious antics" that have "effectively handed over the setting of agency priorities to environmental pressure groups," and has led to rushed rulemaking by the agency.

But Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor at the Vermont Law School, said Pruitt's directive would be "counterproductive" and costly because in the end courts could fine the agency if it does not meet compliance dates for issuing regulations.

"He can fight it if he wants as long as he wants, and spend as much money as he wants," Parenteau said. "But in the end if you've missed a statutory deadline, you are going to be ordered (by a court) to comply and then you are going to be ordered to pay fees."

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Norways goes cool on electric cars

Norway, a world leader of zero-emission vehicles, on Thursday proposed a “Tesla tax” aimed at cutting a tax advantage granted to large electric cars in a heavily criticised move.

Electric cars, which have hitherto been exempted from heavy taxes imposed on other vehicles, accounted for 20 percent of new registrations in the Nordic country since the beginning of this year, an unprecedented market share in the world.

In a 2018 finance bill presented to the parliament on Thursday, the right-wing minority government suggested removing a one-off tax exemption for new electric cars weighing more than two tonnes.

The proposal was immediately dubbed the “Tesla tax” because it primarily affects the high-end models made by the American manufacturer. Buying a new Tesla X would cost about 70,000 kroner (7,500 euros/$8,800) more.

Justifying the proposed tax measures, Finance Minister Siv Jensen argued that these heavy sedans exhaust the roads as much as gasoline and diesel cars, and that the owners should therefore contribute.

The proposal has sparked a heated debate.

“It’s a tax bomb,” Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association Secretary General Christina Bu told AFP.

“This was unexpected by both the drivers and by the car industry and it sends a bad signal to the Norwegians and the world” for which the nation is often a model in this matter, Bu added.

She underlined that Norway has set an ambitious target of ending the sales of new cars with combustion engines as early as 2025.

The largest oil producer in western Europe, Norway has introduced many incentives to purchase electric cars.

In addition to generous tax exemptions, which critics say allow the richest to buy Tesla vehicles at a good price, Norway’s electric car drivers benefit from free city tolls, free parking and the possibility of travelling in the bus corridors.

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Scientist Roy Spencer: Climate Changes Naturally

On the surface, it would appear that Roy Spencer has a comfortable life. He is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he directs climate research projects and has authored books and numerous articles for scientific journals.

Unfortunately for Spencer, he comes down on the wrong side – the politically incorrect side – of global warming and climate change, for which he has taken a lot of heat.

“Nothing we are seeing today is really out of the ordinary,” he said Saturday, sounding exasperated and battle weary as he discussed weather patterns.

Spencer spoke at the Tennessee Eagle Forum Conference at the Embassy Suites hotel, where he provided a summary of the climate debate and spoke of his book, “An Inconvenient Deception: How Al Gore Distorts Climate Science and Energy Policy.”

Spencer said he isn’t a climate denier, but rather a “lukewarmer.” He believes that carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere is causing some warming, but that it’s uncertain how much of it is the result of human activity. It’s also uncertain, he said, if we’re warmer now than during periods of warming in centuries past, such as during the medieval and Roman ages.

“Climate changes naturally,” he said. “That’s something that isn’t often stated.”

Yet it’s something the public instinctively understands, even as climate scientists over the past 30 years have been indoctrinated to believe that “climate can only change when we cause it to change,” Spencer said.

The media has been complicit in promoting spurious ideas about climate change because reporters won’t ask questions that might yield answers that don’t fit with the accepted narrative, he said.

While some people point to the two recent hurricanes in the U.S. as evidence of an unusual occurrence, Spencer said there is a historical pattern of going for some years without getting hit by a major hurricane and then one year getting pounded.

“There’s no good objective evidence that any kind of severe weather is getting worse,” he said. “In fact, major tornadoes in recent years have been down quite a bit.”

Spencer said he believes the modest warming trend we are experiencing may continue, but that it is not necessarily a bad thing. Plants depend on carbon dioxide, and the rest of the food chain depends on plants.

“Even if global warming was a huge problem and was entirely our fault, there is nothing substantial we can do about it without killing millions of people because humanity requires abundant, affordable energy,” he said. “Solar and wind do not yet meet that.”

Spencer said he has never gotten any money from oil companies, even though people think he does get funding from them.

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