Wildfires: The Latest Weapon in the Climate Change Fight

Wildfires: The Latest Weapon in the Climate Change Fight

  23 Jul 2021   ,

It’s summer, and the West is on fire. This is a regular occurrence and we Westerners have learned to live with smokey conditions each year from June to October. Wildfires are caused when the hot, dry conditions found out here in the arid western summer combine with excessive fuel buildup and is ignited by a lightning strike, arsonist, burning cigarette butt, or spark from a passing automobile.

They’re not fun, we don’t like them, they degrade the air quality and worsen the symptoms of those who have asthma and other respiratory conditions, but we’re used to them. In addition to being unpleasant, wildfires are also incredibly destructive and deadly. The infamous Camp Fire claimed 86 lives in 2018 as it burned down the entire town of Paradise, California with terrifying speed.

Climate change activists are claiming that a warming planet caused by human-related activity is causing the increased fire activity out West. They of course use this to demand tighter restrictions on everything from diesel fuel emissions to green taxes on – well, anything they can tax, really.

I get their argument. Fires are scary. They can demolish people’s homes, businesses, their children’s schools, and wipe out entire communities. Fires kill people. The smoke from these massive infernos affect people several states over, with the smoke lingering long after the blaze has been brought under control. It’s easy to weaponize these highly visible, scary occurrences as something that we ALL need to care about, that we ALL need to do our part and pay higher taxes for electric charging ports for other people’s Priuses.

But what these climate change activists don’t mention is the unprecedented buildup of excessive fuels that contribute to the rapid spread of these wildfires. Fuels mainly consist of dry grasses, bushes, and trees. The environmentalists have succeeded in greatly reducing the number of domestic livestock like cattle and sheep that are allowed to graze on our great open public lands, so the fuel buildup is significantly higher than it was even 30 years ago. The motto out West is “Graze it, log it, or watch it burn,” and that is one saying that holds more truth than the average bumper sticker.

Environmental policy has also eliminated much logging activity from formerly productive timberland. In their quest to save the environment, green legislation has done more to destroy the forests and meadows of the West than any cow or sheep ever did. Domestic animals were permitted to graze for a short period of time each year, then removed. They eliminated much of the wildfire fuel that today is allowed to grow out of control, feeding the massive fires that we now have come to expect each summer.

Are these modern wildfires caused by a warming climate? It would be all too easy to say yes, just like activists are doing with the extreme flooding in Germany and any storm that occurs that is at least marginally larger than the storm activity in any particular region last year. But, that’s where they’re wrong about wildfires. The fuel load developed by their previously passed legislation has added more literal fuel to the fires than one or two degrees of warming ever could.

3 thoughts on “Wildfires: The Latest Weapon in the Climate Change Fight

  1. Legislators seem to act now and think later. They want to show that they are doing something – anything – in order to get re-elected.

  2. And the CONSERVATIVE’S weapon is BAD forest MANAGEMENT. The RED states don’t have THIS problem. One Enlightened Patriot. Team Trump And His Allies 2020 – MAGA (WE’RE NOT going away!).

  3. “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”― H.L. Mencken

Comments are closed.