Transcription
The California wildfires have been devastating Los Angeles, destroying homes and people's lives. The climate lobby would have you believe that climate change is to blame and that we need sweeping Green New Deal-type energy policies to prevent these wildfires from happening. But that's not true.
They're right that these fires could have been less severe or avoided altogether, but not with their radical climate policies that actually contribute to the severity of these fires in the first place. Here are three failures that led to the LA wildfires.
First, forest management, or in this case, management to prevent wildfires. California and Los Angeles' forest management should have been facilitating more controlled burns, also called prescribed burns. That's right, you have to create small controlled fires to prevent large uncontrollable ones. This might sound counterintuitive, but it's actually standard practice for forest management. Controlled burns clear the brushwood that otherwise functions as fuel, leading to the catastrophic fires we're witnessing in LA that are nearly impossible to stop.
Leftist climate activists have spent decades successfully lobbying to prevent forest management techniques like underbrush removal and controlled burns in the name of protecting the natural habitats of certain animals and protecting the air from pollutants. The result? Devastating wildfires that destroy vastly greater amounts of natural habitats and grow to burn other structures that release far more harmful pollutants, not to mention the destruction of people's livelihoods.
There goes the structure. Oh, look at it collapse. There it goes.
Second, a failure of leadership at every level of California government. Officials have demonstrated that their priorities are entirely out of order. One example: about 20% of fire hydrants in the Palisades area of Los Angeles, where wildfires were the worst, ran out of water. Local officials say the fires were simply too massive for what their infrastructure was prepared for. But had California taken its land management seriously, the fires likely would not have grown to such a catastrophic magnitude in the first place.
And finally, the lack of qualified personnel within LA County Public Services is staggering. In 2023, California's fire foundry program set out to explicitly reduce the number of white men that made up their firefighting force, prioritizing meaningless skin color diversity over qualification to fight fires.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power boasts that they are leading their work with equity. Yanis Kones, the first Spanish-speaking and Latina CEO and chief engineer of the LA Department of Water and Power, said that equity was "the number one thing that attracted me to this role." She went on to say that "it's important to me that everything we do is with an equity lens."
It's been really important for the DWP to put an equity lens on everything. Yes, yeah, and that's the number one thing that attracted me to this role. It's important to me that everything we do has an equity lens.
The fire chief of LA County, Kristen Crowley, bragged in her fire chief nomination acceptance speech that she would "fully commit to fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture within the LAFD." In an interview with a local NBC station shortly after assuming the role, she bragged about her three-year strategic plan to increase diversity in the firefighting force, saying that no amount of diversity is ever enough.
She took time out of her already busy schedule to tell us about her vision for the department's future, one that includes a three-year strategic plan to increase diversity. People ask me, "What number are you looking for?" I said, "I'm not looking for a number. It's never enough."
The sad truth is that if Los Angeles had focused more on finding qualified people to manage their forests and water and less on DEI and climate hysteria, many Californians would still have their homes and their lives today.