What is it about California that creates natural disasters and blackouts?
The earthquakes are a natural phenomenon, but the blackouts and the intense forest fires? Those have roots in the inept progressive government that runs the state.
The San Francisco Chronicle notes that the wildfires in California have a lot to do with mismanagement by the state’s government. Matier and Ross wrote for the SFC in November of 2018, “‘A century of mismanaging Sierra Nevada forests has brought an unprecedented environmental catastrophe that impacts all Californians.’ That’s not a tweet from President Trump, but the opening line of a February report by California’s Little Hoover Commission investigating fire danger in the state.”
Chuck DeVore wrote that same month in Forbes:
California’s politicians, bureaucrats, electric utilities and even celebrities have taken to using “climate change” as a multipurpose excuse for having done nothing to prevent deadly wildfires.
Doing nothing, at least nothing effective, has been a central public policy feature in the climate change debate, especially when it comes to wildfires.
The facts are clear: California’s deadliest year of wildfires has been decades in the making, with overlapping environmental rules, both state and federal, making fuel load reductions in forests and coastal chaparral nearly impossible, while hostility towards commercial timber harvesting has allowed a massive build up in tree density and brush with a concurrent reduction of access roads and firebreaks.
Yet in spite of blaming climate change and attacking President Trump for suggesting bad environmental policies made California’s fires worse, California’s outgoing governor, Jerry Brown, quietly signed two bills to correct the worst of the state’s fire management policy missteps, proving Trump was right all along.
I first noticed that doing nothing was deliberate policy in 2007 when the Speaker of the California State Assembly gifted every member of the State Assembly with 3 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions reductions from the Van Eck Forest Project.
In addition to facing the threat of wildfires, worsened by the state’s politicians, Californians are again facing the threat of rolling power outages. California’s relentless persecution of fossil and nuclear fuel power generators has created a lack of supply during peak periods in power demand in the state. Now, on the hottest days, Californians can be left without air conditioning or fans because the demand cannot be met. The New York Times reports:
Ms. Gonzales said the electric grid manager did not have an immediate response to questions about the energy prices because officials were responding to the emergency.
“But the ISO isn’t saying it’s congestion,” said Loretta Lynch, a former president of the California Public Utilities Commission. “They’re not saying a wire got burned down. It’s saying it’s a lack of power.”
In particular, California ISO said two natural gas power plants shut down on Friday and, on Saturday, a wind farm and another gas plant stopped producing power.
The state is currently reviewing proposals to extend the operation of old natural gas plants in Southern California. Environmentalists want the plants to remain closed because they use fossil fuels and are cooled using seawater, endangering marine life.
If you live in California, it’s up to you to prepare for the flames. Also, if you have a generator, how confident are you in it? And if you don’t have one, what are you waiting for?
Action line: Make sure your family’s power is secure. Own a generator.
