California Fires Are An Indictment Of Nationalizing Everything In Politics
Local responsibilities matter
The fallout from the burning scenes in Los Angeles for Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass is obviously one of their own making, and it’s not politicizing the fires to say that. Here’s my Friday morning hit with Hugh Hewitt on this:
As I noted, the past decisions of local policymakers — from Newsom on down — are all to blame for this. They’ve escaped the consequences of these decisions by doing things like, well, this. But no one cares about reparations, wokeness, or DEI policies when their house is burning to the ground.
The devastating wildfires that have laid waste to entire Los Angeles neighborhoods were fueled in large part by dried-out underbrush piling up in the surrounding hills, which state and local officials ignored warnings about for years and at times even misled the public about efforts to clear it.
Removal of decaying vegetation is a key component of brushfire prevention in arid climates, but LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom repeatedly failed to address the problem, which set the stage for one of the worst disasters in the history of the city…
It was no secret that the Pacific Palisades were slowly becoming a tinderbox over the years, with Newsom himself pledging on his first day in office in 2019 to overhaul the state’s wildfire prevention apparatus.
“We need to do more and better,” he said at the time, promising the state would “step up our game” when it comes to forest thinning, controlled burns and other mitigation efforts aimed at protecting vulnerable communities — some of which were reduced to cinders this week as the fires devoured the long-uncleared brush.
Despite his tough talk, Newsom slashed and burned the state’s fire prevention budget by around $150 million — during one of its worst years for wildfires on record, according to an NPR report.
Even more galling, the governor shamelessly embellished the number of acres treated under his promised plan, claiming 90,000 acres were treated when the true figure was closer to 12,000.
Here’s The New York Times four months ago profiling the head of the Butte County’s prescribed burn association:
Land managers in the state, including the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and federal agencies have set a target of intentionally burning 400,000 acres annually by next year, an amount of land that when combined would be larger than the city of Los Angeles. The goal is to chip away at the 10 million to 30 million acres that officials estimate would benefit from some form of fuel reduction treatment. In 2022, the most recent year for which there is data publicly available, about 96,000 acres were burned by these land managers.
“The state is struggling to get anywhere close to the targets they have for prescribed fire,” said Chris Field, a climate scientist at Stanford who has studied controlled burns. “It’s clear that there would be real profound benefits of reaching the target and ultimately going beyond it."
According to one study from researchers at Columbia and Stanford, low-intensity fires, a category that includes mild natural fires and prescribed burns, reduce wildfire risk by about 60 percent. Experts also say that prescribed burns have reduced the severity of previous wildfires, including in Yosemite National Park, where researchers found that they helped protect giant sequoias during the Washburn fire in 2022.
Most of California’s ecosystems have evolved to adapt to or depend on fire, which can rejuvenate forests and help nutrients return to the soil. But federal and state land management agencies banned intentional burns for many decades, arguing that all fires were dangerous and could hurt the timber industry. This, along with aggressive efforts to suppress wildfires, allowed vegetation to accumulate, a condition that could supercharge blazes…
Some of these concerns are rooted in fears of what could go wrong in a prescribed fire. The U.S. Forest Service has said that over 99 percent of these fires go as planned, but mistakes can be destructive. In 2022, the agency lost control of two prescribed burns in New Mexico. The fires merged and grew to become the largest recorded fire in the state’s history, destroying hundreds of homes.
However, experts say that avoiding these burns can also have consequences. The Sacramento Bee reported in early August that the authorities in Chico, the college town where the Park fire ignited, had planned but not carried out a prescribed burn that could have curbed the giant blaze.
Californians, who pay the highest rate of taxation in the US and whose state shares 850 miles of coastline with the Pacific Ocean, are understandably asking why the response to the fires has been on a par with a landlocked developing country.
Across America, too, voters are seeing the unfolding horror as a fitting epitaph to the Biden presidency, which spent far too much time and resources pursuing politically correct causes at the expense of competent or even sane governance. Democrats are supposed to make government work, yet their wasteful incompetence has turned California from one of America’s best states into arguably its worst.
Official Californian programmes focused on reducing the number of white male firefighters, as if anybody cares about the skin or sex of the person with the hose when their house is immolating. The Californian governor, Gavin Newsom, regularly touted as the next Democratic presidential nominee, has often tried to present himself as more pragmatic than his peers. In 2019, he promised to revamp the state’s emergency response systems. Yet he then slashed some $150 million from the state’s wildfire prevention budget, even as he kept some 90 per cent of the state’s $50 billion climate budget.
WSJ on expectations for the multi-billion dollar recovery costs.
Gavin Newsom fakes call with Biden to get away from angry resident.
The Logic of Buying Greenland
It would be easy to laugh off Trump’s annexation claims as little more than political trolling aimed at stirring up his MAGA base and usefully diverting attention from more pressing issues, such as the lack of a clear strategy for managing the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. There is, though, more to this story that just Trump shooting off his mouth. In fact, Greenland has long been a serious obsession for the former and future president, who first made a bid to purchase the island in 2019.
But why is Trump so keen on this huge, icy rock where living conditions are so extreme that the tiny population (60,000) of mostly indigenous communities has to rely on fishing and hunting for its livelihood? In fact, it’s pretty straight-forward. For starters, Greenland is rich in natural resources, including rare earth minerals, which are critical for America’s high-tech industries and green technologies.
More important is its position at the doorstep of the geopolitically invaluable Arctic Ocean. Not only does the region hold vast untapped reserves of oil and gas, but as ice caps melt, previously inaccessible maritime pathways are opening up that could significantly alter global trade dynamics. Chief among these is the Northern Sea Route, along Russia’s coast and through the Baring Strait, which could cut transit times between Asia and Europe by as much as 40%, bypassing traditional routes through the Panama and Suez Canals.
Trump surely knows that Russia, with its extensive Arctic coastline, is uniquely positioned to capitalise on the region’s potential. Indeed, the Northern Sea Route is the lynchpin of Moscow’s new energy strategy; it has constructed ports, terminals and icebreaker fleets aimed at leveraging the new shipping routes to export oil, LNG and other resources from the Arctic regions to global markets, particularly Asia. It has also expanded its military presence. China, meanwhile, is also heavily present: having designated itself as a “near-Arctic state” in 2018, it has since been investing in the region through its Polar Silk Road initiative, aiming to integrate Arctic shipping into its broader Belt and Road framework.
Against this backdrop, Trump’s statements take on a more serious note. Far from being idle musings, they underscore the idea that Greenland is a vital part of the longstanding US ambition to strengthen its Arctic foothold and thereby counter the encroaching presence of Russia and China. In this sense, Trump’s talk of annexation and even military intervention, neither of which are likely to happen, risks being a distraction from the wider geopolitical dynamic at play: the scramble for the Arctic, one of the new “Great Games” of the 21st century and one that is already playing out.
To play this game, the US doesn’t actually need to seize physical control of Greenland. It already wields significant influence there under a 1951 treaty with Denmark: it bears substantial responsibility over Greenland’s defence, and operates a major base on the island — Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) — a critical component of its missile defense system. Any push to expand its military presence would face little resistance from Denmark, given its Atlanticist alignment and wariness of Russia. An independent Greenland would be even weaker against US demands — despite its premier claiming that Greenland “will never be for sale”.
More on why Trump can push a divided, weakened Europe around. And yes, as a factual matter, America can buy another country — we’ve done it before.
SCOTUS Considers TikTok’s Fate
TikTok’s lawyer, Noel Francisco, told the court that the law unlawfully burdens the platform’s First Amendment rights.
“It singles out a single speaker for uniquely harsh treatment, and it does so because the government fears that China could in the future indirectly pressure Tiktok, to disseminate foreign misinformation,” Francisco said.
In early questioning from the court, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested the law wasn’t restricting TikTok’s speech, but instead its Chinese ownership.
Chief Justice John Roberts said the court couldn’t ignore congressional concerns that Beijing could use TikTok to spread propaganda and collect data on Americans.
“It seems to me that you’re ignoring the major concern here of Congress, which was Chinese manipulation of the content and acquisition and harvesting of the content,” Roberts said.
More from former Congressman Mike Gallagher:
Last month a panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the law unanimously and dismissed TikTok’s Orwellian position that protecting the First Amendment somehow violates the First Amendment: “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.” If the Supreme Court follows suit, TikTok will have no remaining legal recourse.
The best outcome for TikTok would be a sale to an owner that isn’t connected to a foreign adversary. The goal has never been to stop Americans from using TikTok but rather to let them use it safely. This position enjoys bipartisan and bicameral agreement in Congress and support from the executive branch and would raise no objection in the courts.
Contrary to TikTok’s claims, the Protecting Americans Act isn’t a ban on TikTok or any other app. It simply prevents foreign adversary entities, like ByteDance, from owning American social-media platforms. For almost a century, the U.S. has prohibited foreign control of radio and television stations—America would never have permitted the Soviet Union to buy or control such entities. Had social media existed at the time, it would have undoubtedly been included.
Limits on foreign social-media ownership are even more justified for two reasons. First, TikTok—unlike broadcast stations—doesn’t merely produce content. TikTok can manipulate the content that Americans themselves create, for example by censoring what TikTok’s communist overlords don’t want Americans to see or by amplifying inflammatory content.
Second, through TikTok, China can gain access to detailed data on hundreds of millions of American users. One only need look to the recent Salt Typhoon hacking operation of American telecom networks to understand this threat.
The law Congress passed isn’t the obstacle to saving TikTok. It is General Secretary Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. Despite having six months to find a buyer, TikTok insists that divestment is impossible. That is only because Mr. Xi and the Chinese have imposed export restrictions preventing a sale and have blocked negotiations to facilitate divestment.
Feature
Items of Interest
Foreign
Trump says he will meet with Putin to discuss Ukraine.
The long road to Trudeau’s resignation.
Farewell to last of the lockdown tyrants.
Murray: What does justice look like for Britain’s grooming gang victims?
Why the U.S. Navy may be rebuilt in Korea.
Domestic
Jobs report surprises on the high side.
Trump avoids jail time or fines in New York case.
Restaurants experiencing tip fatigue.
“No one is my gatekeeper” — Fetterman heads to Mar a Lago.
Democrats flip the script for Trump 2.0.
Things keep getting worse for Eric Adams.
Trump cabinet of billionaires takes Washington.
Joe Biden’s awkward exit interview.
Presidential interactions at Jimmy Carter funeral.
Trump, Obama funeral laughs go viral.
Media
Did we learn anything from Charlie Hebdo?
It’s open season at the Washington Post.
LAT owner considering backing MAGA version of The View.
Ephemera
Dune Part Two and Hundreds of Beavers top Letterboxd 2024 year in review.
Controversy on jet squadron trade for RFK stadium.
Memories of childhood snow days.
Podcast
Quote
“‘No!’ cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. ‘With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.’ His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. ‘Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.’”
— J.R.R. Tolkien