“California environmental law as currently written basically encourages more housing development outside the urban core, which makes catastrophes like the LA fire more likely,” explains Ned Resnikoff of Business Insider. He adds:
New housing tends to get built in the areas most vulnerable to climate disasters. Once again, take California: San Francisco and other exclusionary coastal towns block new housing, so much of the state’s homebuilding takes the form of single-family sprawl deep into extremely hot inland, low-lying areas or into what’s called the wildland-urban interface: the part of the state where forest fires crash up against human habitation, with deadly results. Ironically, some of this allocation is done under the cover of environmentalism. The California Environmental Quality Act requires developers to go through a convoluted environmental-review process to get their projects approved….it’s still a powerful tool that not-in-my-backyarders, or NIMBYs, can use to block development in their neighborhoods. Unsurprisingly, the threat of CEQA litigation tends to loom largest in affluent, exclusive communities; the risk of litigation is lowest in sparsely populated areas, where there are few residents to complain about new housing. Thus the law actually creates an incentive to concentrate development in the wildland-urban interface, away from the more densely populated areas that also happen to be more fire-resistant.
A massive fire near Los Angeles — the Palisades fire — has burned 24,000 acres and is still spreading, only 19% contained. Some of that fire’s spread might have been prevented, if the California Coastal Commission had not blocked fireproofing of an area near the fire, citing environmental reasons. The Commission “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 noted:
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.
The massive fires around Los Angeles will harm the environment, by sending toxins from burned houses and cars, and other pollutants, into the atmosphere. 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.”
