A forest management admission from Gov. Newsom

Sep 18, 2020
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John,

Diverging from the climate change script: For weeks, the mainstream media has been telling us that only climate change is responsible for California’s wildfires. To hold a more nuanced view is tantamount to being a “climate denier.” Yet this week, none other than Gov. Gavin Newsom broke ([link removed]) from this script during a meeting with President Trump in Sacramento. Said Newsom:

There’s no question, when you look past this decade and looking past almost 1,000-plus years, that we have not done justice on our forest management. I don’t think anyone disputes that…. We acknowledge our role and responsibility to do more in that space.

Yet the mainstream media has glossed over this major admission in favor of more stories that implicitly or explicitly claim that forest fires will stop if Democrats are elected. This recent journalism is a case study in how the media has sacrificed its credibility in favor of partisanship.

CPC analyses offer much-needed perspective: In his latest analysis ([link removed]) this week, CPC contributor Edward Ring offers a set of facts to demonstrate that poor forest management is the main culprit for the historic forest fires:
* The timber industry in California has been cut to a small fraction of what it was in 1990 in terms of employment and board feet of timber harvested. In 1990, 6.0 billion board feet were harvested from California’s forests, today the harvest ([link removed]) rarely exceeds 1.5 billion board feet.

* Year after year, millions of acre-feet of snow and rain fall on these dense tree canopies and either evaporate immediately, or are sucked up by the overgrown, water-stressed biomass as soon as they hit the ground. Far less water makes it into the aquifers and rivers ([link removed]) as a result.

* The overgrown forests are not only packing up to 10 times more fuel than what is historically normal, but because these trees aren’t adapted to being packed so close together, half of them are dead or dying ([link removed]) , which means they are tinder dry.

As Ed notes, these perilous forest conditions are far more likely to cause fires than even a couple of degrees of global warming.

Firefighter unions reduce firefighting capacity: Ed also notes that firefighters’ opposition to innovations like the City of Placentia’s move ([link removed]) to form its own fire department (in order to cut union-related costs) threaten firefighting capacity: “It is simply impossible to significantly expand California’s firefighter headcount when the average full-time firefighter in California costs taxpayers well over $200,000 per year in pay and benefits.”

Changing the debate: Ed’s piece last week, “Environmentalists Destroyed California’s Forests ([link removed]) ,” which gave a broader perspective than the climate change narrative, was very popular. He appeared on John and Ken in LA and on the Rod Arquette Show in Salt Lake City to discuss it. Listen to those segments HERE ([link removed]) .

Forest management microcosm: Yesterday, a Wall Street Journal article ([link removed]) , carrying a Berry Creek, CA dateline, tells one story of the futile effort to conduct forest management in the face of byzantine regulations in the state:

As the smoke from the nearby fire-devastated town of Paradise cleared in 2018, local officials were trying to gain approval of forest-thinning projects to help this mountain community avoid a similar fate. Nearly two years after they first applied for approval from the state of California, the contract for one of the projects went out for bidding on Sept. 4….

After the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise on Nov. 8, 2018, officials of the Butte County Fire Safe Council—which acts as an umbrella group for fire safety in the area—urged state lawmakers to streamline regulatory red tape….

The Berry Creek projects languished as the Butte County Fire Safe Council struggled to gain landowner approvals for the thinning, a requirement of the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. One of the strictest such laws in the nation, CEQA makes it easy for local residents and interest groups to oppose construction and development projects. In addition, Cal Fire officials kicked back some of the paperwork filed by the local leaders because it had been improperly formatted.

Escape from LA: On the latest episode ([link removed]) of National Review’s Radio Free California, CPC President Will Swaim and board member David Bahnsen discuss the reigning narrative that California’s wildfire catastrophe is the result of climate change. They also highlight this week’s news that the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s popular conservative media empire, is leaving LA for Nashville. As Shapiro put it, “Terrible governance has consequences.” Shapiro marks the second top-10 ranked national podcast to decamp from LA in recent weeks; Joe Rogan moved to Austin (with his $100 million Spotify deal) earlier this summer.

The lifetime learning loss from closed classrooms: Stanford University’s Eric Hanushek, one of the nation’s leading education economists, is out with a new report ([link removed]) , published by the OECD, on the impact of classroom closures on students’ future earnings. He concludes that school shutdowns have reduced affected students' lifetime incomes by about three percent so far, with disproportionate adverse outcomes for minorities. These economic consequences will only grow the longer that classrooms remain closed. Economists generally agree that each additional year of schooling raises lifetime earnings by roughly 7.5 to 10 percent. Most California students have had almost no productive learning over the last six months.

Correcting Randi’s record: In his latest CPC contribution ([link removed]) , Larry Sand goes after teacher union boss Randi Weingarten for her false claim that public education funding has been reduced. Larry clarifies: “The fact is that we now spend over $15,000 per K-12 student each year – almost double what we spent in 1980, and yes, that is correcting for inflation.” And $15,000 would be a great deal. As Edward Ring has shown ([link removed]) , the actual figure – accounting for bond debt and employee retirement obligations – drives that number above $20,000 per pupil per year. That’s more than the in-state tuition for a year at any University of California campus.

Proposition polling update: New polls ([link removed]) released this week by the Public Policy Institute of California find that Prop 16, which seeks to reverse the state ban on racial preference, is supported by 31 percent of likely voters vs. 47 percent opposed. And Prop 15, which would significantly raise taxes on small businesses, is supported by 51 percent of likely voters vs. 40 percent opposed.

Racism by any other name: In a powerful op-ed ([link removed]) against Prop 16 in the San Diego Union-Tribune, Frank Xu writes, “Proponents of Proposition 16 couch their support for the measure by using words like ‘diversity’ and ‘representation.’ What they are really advocating is that the government treat its citizens differently based on immutable characteristics.”

Racist if you do, racist if you don’t: Several weeks ago, I relayed the story ([link removed]) of the Bay Area college professor who was fired for asking his student named Phuc Bui if she had a nickname name that didn’t sound so offensive. (Phuc Bui had previously asked to be called May.) The college deemed the request “xenophobic and racist.”

More recently, a USC professor was removed ([link removed]) from teaching his class for properly pronouncing the Mandarin phrase nèi ge. Students complained that the phrase sounded like the N-word, was “hurtful and unacceptable,” and impaired their mental health to the point they could no longer focus on their studies. USC released the standard groveling apology and promise to do better.

Yet USC students and alumni of Chinese descent defended the professor for the proper use of the phrase and implied that calling a Mandarin phrase racist is also, in its own right, racist.

Who knew critical race theory could be so interesting?!

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Jordan Bruneau
Communications Director
[email protected] (mailto:[email protected])


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