If they want the envirowhackos to run the show, fine. The rest of us shouldn’t pick up the tab.
President Donald Trump took aim at California governor Gavin Newsom Sunday morning over wildfires raging across the southern and western parts of the state, chastising Newsom for letting environmentalists run the show, preventing the state from adquately clearing brush and dead vegetation.
Trump also threatened to cut off Federal funding to California for fire abatement and land management if Newsom doesn’t shape up.
President Trump Takes Aim At California Governor Gavin Newsom Over Wildfires, Threatens To Cut Funding
You do realize most of the fires on the West Coast are on federal land, not state or.. privately owned.
That's an interesting point, I'm trying to validate that claim.
California fires: State, feds agree to thin millions of acres of forests
New plan would last 20 years, reshaping California’s landscape.
Last week, in a little-noticed milestone, state officials signed a major agreement with the federal government that aims to reshape how forests are managed for years to come.
Under
the plan, California agencies and the U.S. Forest Service will use brush clearing, logging and prescribed fires to thin out 1 million acres a year by 2025 — an area larger than Yosemite National Park every 12 months, and roughly double the current rate of thinning, which already is double rates from a few years ago.
The Forest Service and the state Natural Resources Agency also committed to drawing up a 20-year plan by next year to identify which areas of the state will get priority for thinning projects. They will update it every five years and share it with the public.
“What we’re seeing is a real partnership. There is a coming together,” said Jessica Morse, deputy secretary for forest resource management at the California Natural Resources Agency.
“The legacy of fire suppression has contributed to the overstocked forests that we have today,” Morse said. “It’s leading to catastrophic wildfires that are compounded by climate change.”
Also environmentalists have massively limited logging. Logging was a major industry in CA as late a forty years ago.
The goal is to treat at least 15 million acres, roughly 15% of all the land in California, including conifer forests like the ones that are burning near the coast, along with oak woodlands and other landscapes.
It’s part of a three-step strategy she said the state is expanding. First is urging residents to clear “defensible space” around their homes. Second is creating thinned-out areas, known as “shaded fuel breaks,” between wild areas and communities, like
a project the state completed along Highway 17 between Los Gatos and Summit Road in Santa Cruz County last year. And, finally, finishing larger restoration projects to thin trees and brush
back to more historic levels, first with chain saws, and then in several years, with controlled burns.
Current environmental regulations sharply limit the needed thinning of trees and brush on all property.
Environmental regulations will need to be streamlined, particularly permits for landowners with small parcels to thin trees and brush on their properties. Roughly 40% of the 33 million acres of forest in California are owned by private landowner.
Trump signed a key piece of bipartisan legislation last month, the Great American Outdoors Act, which provides $9.5 billion over the next five years for upgrades at America’s national parks, along with projects on other public lands like national forests, which could pay for some thinning costs.
Before 1849 Gold Rush roughly 4.5 million acres a year in California burned. For the last 70 years that was down to about 250,000 acres a year. In recent years, it's risen to 2 million acres a year.
Forests in the Sierra typically had about 40 trees per acre in the early 1800s. Now they are choked with 400 or more. Heavy brush and thick forests are burning now in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A fire in forests with 400 hundred or more trees per acre is massively hotter and far more destructive that a fire on land with 40 trees per acre.
“The scale of these fires in Santa Cruz, I think a lot of people thought weren’t possible,” he said. “It’s been 50 to 70 years since a lot of these places have burned.
There’s got to be better conservation of these forests.”
With wildfires raging, new agreement between California and the federal government aims to thin 1 million acres a year of forests and other landscapes — more than double the current rate.
www.mercurynews.com