California fires: Shellenberger

 https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1878171577336090996

Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger

As a new wave of fire and high winds threaten Los Angeles, the media is reporting that California’s elected leaders are not to blame and that right-wing influencers and Donald Trump are spreading misinformation and politicizing a tragedy. Racial and gender quotas through DEI aren’t to blame. No, Mayor Karen Bass didn’t cut the Fire Department’s budget. No, Gavin Newsom didn’t cut CalFire’s wildfire prevention budget. And no, there wasn’t any way to prevent these fires or the fire hydrant water from running out. Climate change made the disaster inevitable due to “whiplashing” rain levels. They’re all lies. The Fire Department had made DEI such a priority that the city’s Deputy Fire Chief dismissed concerns that women would not be able to carry a man out of a fire by saying, “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.” Newsom did indeed reduce CalFire’s wildfire prevention budget by $150 million in 2020. If California had elected leaders who cared about the people and were competent, they could have prevented the catastrophic fires from destroying 14,000 homes and businesses and forcing nearly 200,000 people to evacuate. Climate change is not responsible for the disasters and there is no change in the rain pattern. As always, nuance is required. The offhand remark by the Fire Chief is not proof that DEI contributed to the inadequate response. The disaster is decades in the making. LA’s leaders have known that the city was unprepared for catastrophic wildfires since the Bel Air Fire of 1961, which occurred when Karen Bass was a child and Gavin Newsom wasn’t alive. LA’s fire budget had actually increased by about $50 million compared to the last budget, reported Politico, Time, and the LA Times. And Newsom increased the CalFire budget after 2020 and increased land treated for wildfire prevention by 90,000 acres. But these facts are either wrong, misleading, or both. The attitude toward vulnerable men expressed by the deputy Fire Chief is deeply alarming and anathema to firefighter ethics. That the disaster was decades in the making makes the inaction by California political leaders even more inexcusable. The City Council in November approved $53 million to raise salaries, but that funding is completely irrelevant to the millions Bass cut, which her fire chief last month said had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.” And while funding for wildfire prevention increased recently, it wasn’t enough, and Newsom was caught overstating how much land was treated by 690%. The amount of irresponsibility and incompetence displayed by Newsom and Bass is so extreme that insiders are coming forward and speaking out publicly. The owner of the Los Angeles Times went on national television to call it “crazy that we don’t elect leaders with competence.” And LA Fire Chief Kristen Crowley went on CNN, CBS, and Fox to denounce Bass. “Let me be clear,” she said, “the $17 million budget cut… did absolutely negatively impact…. We do not have enough firefighters….We need 62 more fire stations. We've had a 55 percent increase in overall call volume since 2010 and we’re doing it with less firefighters.” As I reported yesterday, over half of all fires that the LA Fire Department puts out are started by the homeless, who may well have started some of the fires ravaging LA. Gavin Newsom spent $24 billion of taxpayer money to increase homelessness by 40% since he took office. Karen Bass ran on a promise to force the homeless inside into shelters but has not done so. Every hour that passes, more information emerges of the corruption, incompetence, and failure. A major reservoir in Pacific Palisades, an epicenter of the fires, was out of commission for minor repairs when disaster struck. Had it been in operation, water pressure would have lasted longer during critical hours, and many homes may have been saved. Yesterday, a leaked LA government memo revealed that Bass had intended to cut an additional $49 million, on top of the $17.5 million already cut, from the fire budget. “I was also directed to develop a plan as part of a budget reduction exercise, and that could equate to 48.8 million,” the LA Fire chief told CNN. “I rang the bell that these additional cuts could be very, very devastating for our ability to provide public safety. That would have resulted to 15 fire stations closing down and potentially the elimination of over 300 firefighters.” The date of the memo is January 6, which is four days after the National Weather Service warned of danger, two days after Bass flew to Ghana on a vanity junket, and one day before the start of the Palisades fire. And LA Fire Department insiders say the head of the city’s Department of Water and Power, who Bass hired, knowingly left fire hydrants remain broken for months, and was the person responsible for draining the emptied reservoir. The response from the news media is that critics of all of this should shut up. “We’re on fire,” editorializedthe LA Times. “Maybe this is not the time for your political hot take.” Why are the LA Times and others in the media defending Bass and Newsom? In large measure because they officially endorsed them. More than that. They actively campaign for them. The hyper-partisan turn of California media two decades ago predated the more recent hyper-partisan nature of the national media. That Democrats had total, supermajority control over the state for 20 years made California media super-authoritarian. The LA Times, in particular is a radical Left publication. It has for years adamantly opposed hospitalizing homeless mentally ill people or requiring homeless addicts to go inside. In both 2020 and in 2021, the LA Times editorial board called for defunding the police to divert funding to social services. For the LA Times, Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass, who visited Cuba at least eight times, expressing admiration for its system of socialist dictatorship, aren’t Left-wing enough. For the media and California’s politicians, the problem is we the people. We complain too much. Our taxes aren’t high enough. We’re causing too much climate change. We get too much in the way of police and fire fighting. And most of all, we spend too much time listening to right-wing influencers who only spread misinformation. We need to sit down and shut up. Like LA’s radical Left deputy fire chief, the media and California’s politicians believe, deep down, that if the people of Los Angeles have to be rescued from fires, then that’s just proof that they got themselves in the wrong place.