All the governors of these western states have their forests burning due to no fire lines being cut and letting their forests grow wild. With the hot weather, lack of rain, dry forests, and now lightning storms, all of the forests are on fire and there are not enough fire fighters to put it out. The states will have to wait for fall rains as helicopters cannot see into the thick smoke. All of the states will have grave air and water pollution problems. For the first time, people are moving out of California more than coming in.
California: "SAN FRANCISCO - The cityscape resembles the surface of a distant planet, populated by a masked alien culture. The air, choked with blown ash, is difficult to breathe.
There is the Golden Gate Bridge, looming in the distance through a drift-smoke haze, and the Salesforce Tower, which against the blood-orange sky appears as a colossal spaceship in a doomsday film.
San Francisco, and much of California, has never been like this.
California has become a warming, burning, epidemic-challenged and expensive state, with many who live in sophisticated cities, idyllic oceanfront towns and windblown mountain communities thinking hard about the viability of a place many have called home forever. For the first time in a decade, more people left California last year for other states than arrived.
Monica Gupta Mehta and her husband, an entrepreneur, have been through tech busts and booms, earthquakes, wildfire seasons and power outages. But it was not until the skies darkened and cast an unsettling orange light on their Palo Alto home earlier this week that they ever considered moving their family of five somewhere else.
"For the first time in 20-something years, the thought crossed our minds: Do we really want to live here?" said Mehta, who is starting an education tech company."
SAN FRANCISCO - The cityscape resembles the surface of a distant planet, populated by a...
www.chron.com
Oregon: "SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Hundreds of firefighters battled two large wildfires Friday that threatened to merge near the most populated part of Oregon, including the suburbs of Portland, and the governor said dozens of people are missing in other parts of the state.
The state’s emergency management director, Andrew Phelps, said officials are “preparing for a mass fatality event” and that thousands of structures have been destroyed.
Gov. Kate Brown said more than 40,000 Oregonians have been evacuated and about 500,000 are in different levels of evacuation zones, either having been told to leave or to prepare to do so. She was dialing back on a statement late Thursday issued by the state Office of Emergency Management that said a half-million people had been ordered to evacuate statewide.
Dozens of people are missing in Jackson County in the south and Marion County, where a fire continues to burn east of Salem, Brown told a news conference Friday. Also Friday, authorities announced that a man had been arrested on two counts of arson for allegedly starting a fire in southern Oregon on Tuesday."
SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Hundreds of firefighters battled two large wildfires Friday that threatened to merge near the most populated part of Oregon, including the suburbs of Portland, and the governor said dozens of people are missing in other parts of the state.
apnews.com
Washington: "SEATTLE — Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says the fires devastating California and the Northwest shouldn’t be called wildfires, but “climate fires.”
At a news conference Friday, the Democrat noted that the roughly 980 square miles burned in Washington in just the last five days amounts to the state’s second worst fire season on record, after 2015.
“This is not an act of God,” Inslee said. “This has happened because we have changed the climate of the state of Washington in dramatic ways.”
Inslee ran for the Democratic presidential nomination on a climate platform and said it’s important to fight the fires not just on the ground, but by creating clean-energy jobs and taking other measures to combat climate change."
The Latest on wildfires in the U.S. West (all times local): 3:30 p.m. SEATTLE — Washington Gov. Jay Inslee says the fires devastating California and the Northwest shouldn’t be called wildfires, but “climate fires.”
apnews.com
Mismanagement: "California is suffering from raging wildfires that, as of September 10th, have
burned over 3.1 million acres, caused 12 fatalities, and destroyed over 3,900 structures. Residents are also enduring rolling electricity blackouts and unaffordable energy, yet California’s
greenhouse gas emissions are now rising while the long-term national decline in emissions continues unabated.
Connecting all of these disconcerting trends are California’s policies.
The intention of the California approach is to improve the environment and create a low-cost, low-emission energy infrastructure for the state. In practice, these policies either create avoidable problems (e.g. rolling blackouts) or fail to meet their basic responsibilities (e.g. efficiently manage the forests to avoid uncontrolled wildfires).
Starting with the wildfires, Michael Shellenberger provides an important perspective in his
August 24th Forbes piece. As he notes, “climate change is occurring and playing a role in warmer temperatures and heatwaves”. But, this does not mean that climate change is the driving factor of this year’s wildfires. Instead, as Shellenberger documents, poor forest management practices are the driving factors."
California's energy and forest management policies make wildfires worse, fail to reduce the state's relative greenhouse gas emissions and reduce economic opportunity in the state.
www.forbes.com
