A huge fire near Los Angeles — the Palisades fire — has burned more than 23,000 acres and is still spreading, largely uncontained. Some of that fire’s massive spread could have been prevented, but the California Coastal Commission prevented that, blocking fireproofing of an area near the fire. It “refused to allow a power company to fireproof an area near the Palisades because it required removing a plant that itself needs wildfires to survive.”
As the Wall Street Journal explains:
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in 2019 sought to widen a fire-access road and replace old wooden utility poles in the Topanga Canyon abutting the Palisades with steel ones to make power lines fire- and wind-resistant. In the process, crews removed an estimated 182 Braunton’s milkvetch plants, an endangered species. The utility halted the project as state officials investigated the plant destruction. More than a year later, the California Coastal Commission issued a cease-and-desist order, fined the utility $2 million, and required “mitigation” for the project’s impact on the species…Since the milkvetch requires wildfires to propagate, the only way to boost its numbers is to let the land burn. A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans from what they view as the plant’s rightful habitat. To radical environmentalists, every human is a colonizer.
California’s environmental regulations have driven up electricity prices, yet California’s performance on environmental measures has deteriorated this year due to its counterproductive approach to wildfires. California has the nation’s second-highest electricity prices, due to costly regulations adopted in the name of fighting global warming. But the wildfires California lets rage out of control contribute to global warming. As Quillette noted, “A UCLA study found that California’s wildfire emissions in 2020 were twice the total greenhouse-gas reductions the state achieved from 2003 to 2019. Decades of Californian climate change advocacy has, quite literally, gone up in smoke.”
This year’s wildfires could produce far more pollution, and far more greenhouse gas emissions, than those in 2020, which inflicted far less economic damage and burned up far fewer homes. The “insured losses from these” current “fires will exceed $20 billion, setting a new record for wildfire-related insurance claims in US history. The total economic loss could reach $57 billion.”
States with far fewer climate-change regulations do better at curbing wildfires and the pollution they emit. Florida has lower electricity prices than the national average. But it is much better at fighting wildfires, as NPR reported in 2021. Florida does controlled burns to prevent wildfires. In the first eight months of 2021, Florida did prescribed burns on more than 1.6 million acres, but California only did them on 35,000 acres, leaving some areas of California choked with flammable brush.
