XPost: alt.wildland.firefighting, hawaii.politics, sac.politics   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns   
   From: incompetent.work.democrats@splcenter.org   
      
   On 18 Aug 2023, Rod Stern  posted some   
   news:ubpart$jldo$25@dont-email.me:   
      
   > You Hawaiian bastards voted for it.  You voted incompetent woke   
   > Democrats into office everywhere.   
      
   Barack Obama’s first White House chief of staff famously declared: “You   
   never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” His point has become a   
   cynical tactic of the left ever since.   
      
   Any time there is a tragedy — capitalize on people’s suffering and   
   despair to advance your political agenda.   
      
   It’s in keeping with this doctrine that we hear the rant that climate   
   change was the match that lit the fires.   
      
   The New York Times shamelessly ran this headline: Climate Change Turned   
   Lush Hawaii into a Tinder Box.   
      
   The White House has similarly blamed the Canadian and California   
   wildfires on climate change.   
      
   This is fake news.   
      
   There were many contributing factors to those fires.   
      
   The hot and dry weather and high winds were certainly a major factor.   
      
   Mother Nature periodically erupts with ferocity, and only a fool would   
   believe that any government policy would have changed the heat or wind   
   gusts in the Pacific Ocean.   
      
   But what could have prevented the near-100 deaths, the loss of thousands   
   of homes and the billions of dollars of property damage was better   
   planning for just this kind of event.   
      
   That risk mitigation didn’t happen despite years of warnings by climate   
   experts, the utility companies and local residents.   
      
   Why didn’t it? Well, herein lies the real scandal of the Hawaii fires.   
      
   As The Wall Street Journal explained: “Four years ago, the utility   
   company said it needed to do more to prevent its power lines from   
   emitting sparks. It made little progress, focusing on a shift to clean   
   energy. Between 2019 and 2022, it invested less than $245,000 on   
   wildfire-specific projects on the island, regulatory filings show.”   
      
   Last year, according to CNN, “Hawaiian Electric asked the state Public   
   Utilities Commission to allow it to spend $189 million” to “protect   
   against wildfires and downed power lines.”   
      
   Hawaiian Electric repeatedly warned that “the risk of a utility system   
   causing a wildfire ignition is significant.”   
      
   Yet the money that WAS spent on fire mitigation was less than 1% of what   
   was recommended.   
      
   Almost every fire expert now acknowledges downed power lines ignited the   
   fires.   
      
   This was precisely the same thing that turned California into a tinder   
   box and charred more than 5 million acres of land.   
      
   So why wasn’t the money spent to prevent this tragedy? The answer is   
   partly gross government mismanagement.   
      
   But the climate-change activists played a role here too, by persuading   
   the politicians that the state and the utility must spent tens of   
   millions trying to meet a foolhardy 2015 mandate requiring 100% of the   
   utility’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2045.   
      
   Does anyone believe that if the state had more windmills and solar   
   panels that these horrific fires would not have ravaged the island?   
      
   It wasn’t our fossil-fuel use that caused the fires. It was   
   climate-change alarmists who demanded all the money go to green energy   
   rather than saving at-risk homes and lives.   
      
   There is a bitter irony to this whole story.   
      
   It turns out that in recent years the forest fires in California and   
   Canada and now Hawaii have emitted so much carbon into the planet’s   
   atmosphere that they have undone most of the supposed benefits of the   
   hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars the United States has   
   spent to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions over the past decade.   
      
   In other words, if we simply took a small fraction of the money   
   governments spend on wind and solar and batteries and taking away   
   people’s cars, gas stoves and pizza ovens and instead spent the money on   
   better forest management, we would be doing more to clean the air.   
      
   And we’d be saving many more lives — of humans and animal life and   
   trees. Isn’t that the objective of a true “green” agenda?   
      
   Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an   
   economist at FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of the book “Fueling   
   Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy.”   
      
   https://nypost.com/2023/08/21/green-activists-have-hurt-the-environment-b   
   y-letting-hawaii-and-california-burn/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)