...Article after article blames two things for California’s frequent fires: global warming and human action. ...
...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....
...California and federal agencies have mismanaged forests, not because they don’t care, but because they chose the agenda of environmentalists over commonsense forest management. The result has been deadly.
...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....
...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....
...According to a Reason Foundation study, another flaw in forest management is a systematic reduction in timber removal....
“There’s an old adage that excess timber comes out of the forest one way or the other. It’s either carried out, or it burns out”....
...Ironically, these ill-conceived environmental policies designed to ward off climate change have been the source of massive amounts of carbon dioxide pollution. A forest fire’s initial blaze releases 5.2. million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, according to Forest Service ecologist Leland Tarnay. This is equivalent to the amount of emissions from 1.1 million passenger cars in a year....
The Environmental and Conservation Issues Room
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Originally Posted by Chris
