What's Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires?

Alarmist greens have created a fire hazard that they’re now using to blame
climate change, says CEI’s Myron Ebell.

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Radical environmentalists are increasingly using militant rhetoric to make the case for a proverbial “War on Climate Change.” What else is the Green New Deal if not Total War – the complete mobilization of the American economy – against the boogeyman of man-made emissions?

Myron Ebell (Director of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) notes that compared to the Green New Deal, even WWII and FDR’s New Deal were moderate (WWII only lasted four years – the Green New Deal would be permanent). In other words, the GND is social engineering in green garb – naming “unjust oppression” as one of its ancillary targets, and using soviet-style central planning to achieve its objectives.

Myron was a key figure in the Trump transition team who laid a foundation for the United States’ withdrawal from the genuinely oppressive Paris Climate Accord. He and his colleague at CEI, Patrick J. Michaels, recently wrote an article for the Washington Examiner demonstrating the latest area where the eco-warriors have overplayed their hand.

We are constantly lectured on a tenuous link between hot, dry weather and fires in places like California and Australia, yet misguided land management policies have created the very conditions which are now being blamed on climate change.

Skeptics are labelled “deniers” by those who ignore a much clearer correlation between the prohibition of prescribed burns and the rise of mega-fires such as the one now devastating Southern Australia.

When prescribed burns were implemented, wildfires plummeted. As they declined, due to environmental activism, the size and intensity of wildfires has skyrocketed.

California legislators would do well to remember this bit of native American wisdom:

Fire is medicine.

As the Guardian reports:

“For more than 13,000 years, the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Miwok, Chumash and hundreds of other tribes across California and the world used small intentional burns to renew local food, medicinal and cultural resources, create habitat for animals, and reduce the risk of larger, more dangerous wild fires.”

Groups like the Yurok Cultural Fire Management Council largely get a free pass for their counter-cultural environmental stewardship. Independent scholars like Myron and Patrick, however, have their motives and funding sources questioned by government-funded technocrats, whose budgets depend on dire predictions of impending doom.

When will environmentalists wake up to the wisdom of the Australian aborigines and native Americans, to see that not all human intervention is bad?

Myron joined the show of ideas for the full hour to discuss the problems with modern environmentalism and CEI’s efforts to de-escalate on the latest fronts of the “climate change” battle.

Links:

Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). 

Australian wildfires were caused by humans, not climate change by Myron Ebell and Patrick J. Michaels, Washington Examiner

'Fire is medicine': the tribes burning California forests to save them | US news | The Guardian

Fighting Fire With Fire: Using Cultural Burning Practices - YouTube 

Australia fires: Aboriginal planners say the bush 'needs to burn' - BBC News 

Related Shows:

Richard Epstein on Climate Change 

We Are Not Sardines. We Are People! With Jonathan Wood (Pacific Legal Foundation), March 9, 2014

Environmentalism- The Libertarian Way, with Dr. Mary Ruwart, July 24, 2011