What is extremely sad is the fact that it usually takes years to see the dysfunction, many time unseen at first, that comes from decisions made by those that have little to no skin in the game. In this case, political decisions in the 1990s, some good intentions, could result in unintended consequences in 2018 and beyond. Business joined at the hip with government is a recipe for disaster. Pure Crap-italism brought California this below instead!
In the recent ‘Watts Up With That’ article on the intentional PG&E blackout for a million or more California residents away from the metro areas to prevent wild fires, Anthony Watts rightly lays blame where it needs to be laid:
To better understand how we came to this forced blackout, it is useful to look to the past. When the gold rush led to modern California, early photographers chronicled the landscape .. the wildlife biologist depicted a California countryside of grassland with isolated stands of pines and oaks. The native Americans in the region frequently used fire to shape the landscape to increase the food available for them, as not a lot of sustenance grows on a dense forest floor.
Watts outlines the natural and then outlines what the last 150 years has brought California:
But with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Americans came a thriving economy and the order of government. Trees were useful and valuable, and therefore harvested. Fire was a threat to towns and cities, and thus, suppressed.
For decades, up until the 1970s, California would harvest and replant about as much wood as could be grown through an abundance of sunshine, snow, and rain. But in the 1990s, concern over logging’s effect on the spotted owl (largely misplaced, as time would tell) led to a massive slowdown in the timber harvest, especially on the federal lands that make up about 60 percent of California’s forests.
With a decline in the harvest came a decline in the allied efforts to clear brush, build and maintain access roads and firebreaks. This led inexorably to a decades’ long build-up in the fuel load. Federal funds set aside for increasingly unpopular forest management efforts were instead shifted to fire-suppression expenses.
It must be noted, that the usual suspects have not been mentioned. This is because it has been the “answer” for every question since “experts” predicted Global Cooling in the 1970s and Global Warming in the 1990s who now fly the flag Climate Change as their mantra. Fact is, California is not hotter and drier due to man-made environmental impact, but annual precipitation totals over the past 100 years show no statistically meaningful trend.
In a stroke of some innovative thinking, there was a 2006 report by the Western Governors Association that promoted the use of technological advances to adjust for the overreaction to environmental concerns. The report noted that:
“over time the fire-prone forests that were not thinned, burn in uncharacteristically destructive wildfires… …In the long term, leaving forests overgrown and prone to unnaturally destructive wildfires means there will be significantly less biomass on the ground, and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Their solution was to construct Biomass facilities which can provide power in the kilowatt range to farms and light industry or in the multi-megawatt
range to communities, campuses and industrial complexes. These qualities alone make biomass the most diverse, complex and strategic renewable resource in the region.
Of course, innovative thinking rarely impacts those who are content with the status quo, and so now over a decade later, when the rubber meets the road, and crisis emerges, politicians look to shift the blame:
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, supports the blackout as a preventive measure, noting that the planned power cut “shows that PG&E finally woke up to their responsibility to keep people safe.”
Ironically, it was former Gov. Jerry Brown that changed his tune in recent years as it became apparent that environmental protection turned out to be a worse Rx for the environment (kind of like the typical political wars where their prescription is worse than the “disease”, like The War on Drugs, The War on Poverty, The War on Terror, etc):
California politicians, late to realize the true nature of the wildfire danger, have finally started to play catch-up. Last year, outgoing four-term Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown reversed his longtime reluctance to active forest management when he signed two bills into law, both of which passed on the last day of the legislative session in what was to become California’s deadliest wildfire year.
SB 901 allocated $190 million a year to use prescribed burns to reduce the fuel load while improving forest health, while SB 1260 made three important policy changes to streamline the ability to conduct prescribed and controlled burns; remove air quality impediments to preventive burns; and prevent environmental quality lawsuits from slowing or stopping needed burns.
So it looks like big business married to big government has once again brought about a worse scenario than if they had been kept out of the monopolization of power (no pun intended) for those in Northern California that have escaped the urban areas. Just think what smaller utilities companies in competition along with county governments could have done for those in these areas verses what bureaucrats did in Sacramento! Instead, look at what politicians have done:
In all likelihood, these measures will prove to be too little, too late for rural Californians, many of whom flocked to build along what is known as the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) where land was cheaper and housing costs far less than in California’s dense and heavily regulated urban centers.
The environmentalists who hold sway over much of the California political class chafe at these homes along the edge of the forest and chaparral, calling for development restrictions and special fire taxes to discourage low-cost housing in rural areas and around the suburban periphery.
And now, as the result of forest mismanagement by both the federal government and California, many homeowners living out in the WUI can no longer obtain fire insurance. No fire insurance, no mortgage. No mortgage, no house. Today, it would also appear, no electricity as well.
Like many other states, you have the urban areas that hold most of the decision-making power and then you have the rural areas that are at the mercy of big-money men hundreds of miles away.
It was not meant to be this way, for in my sequel to this post, I will explain that one of the two versions of America saw things very differently. The root of where we (as well as the rural Californians) are today is from decisions made in the late 1700s right on up to the 1860s and beyond. Once again, democracy renders a nation hostage to the majority and powerful and marginalizes those who live and act differently. Democracy is the road one takes when on the way to Socialism, Marxism and Communism.
Stay tuned.
-SF1