What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires? — BZS

Alarmist greens have created a fire hazard that they’re now using to blame climate change, says CEI’s Myron Ebell

22 min readJan 15, 2020

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Radical environmentalists are increasingly using militant rhetoric to make the case for a proverbial “War on Climate Change.” What else is the Green New Deal if not Total War — the complete mobilization of the American economy — against the boogeyman of man-made emissions?

Myron Ebell (Director of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) notes that compared to the Green New Deal, even WWII and FDR’s New Deal were moderate (WWII only lasted four years — the Green New Deal would be permanent). In other words, the GND is social engineering in green garb — naming “unjust oppression” as one of its ancillary targets, and using soviet-style central planning to achieve its objectives.

Myron was a key figure in the Trump transition team who laid a foundation for the United States’ withdrawal from the genuinely oppressive Paris Climate Accord. He and his colleague at CEI, Patrick J. Michaels, recently wrote an article for the Washington Examiner demonstrating the latest area where the eco-warriors have overplayed their hand.

We are constantly lectured on a tenuous link between hot, dry weather and fires in places like California and Australia, yet misguided land management policies have created the very conditions which are now being blamed on climate change.

Skeptics are labelled “deniers” by those who ignore a much clearer correlation between the prohibition of prescribed burns and the rise of mega-fires such as the one now devastating Southern Australia.

California legislators would do well to remember this bit of native American wisdom:

Fire is medicine.

As the Guardian reports:

“For more than 13,000 years, the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Miwok, Chumashand hundreds of other tribes across California and the worldused small intentional burns to renew local food, medicinal and cultural resources, create habitat for animals, and reduce the risk of larger, more dangerous wild fires.”

Groups like the Yurok Cultural Fire Management Council largely get a free pass for their counter-cultural environmental stewardship. Independent scholars like Myron and Patrick, however, have their motives and funding sources questioned by government-funded technocrats, whose budgets depend on dire predictions of impending doom.

When will environmentalists wake up to the wisdom of the Australian aborigines and native Americans, to see that not all human intervention is bad?

Myron joined the show of ideas for the full hourto discuss the problems with modern environmentalism and CEI’s efforts to de-escalate on the latest fronts of the “climate change” battle.

Transcript

Bob Zadek: Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio.

I’d like to start off with a bit of a riddle.

What’s the opposite of Al Gore? Well, the answer to the question is this morning’s guest, Myron Ebell. Myron is the Director of Energy and Environment at one of my favorite free market think tanks, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, aka CEI.

He also chairs an organization called the “Cooler Heads Coalition.” Neat name. The Cooler Heads Coalition has representatives of lots of nonprofit organizations and they are the contrary view to the alarmist attitude held by many on the left that our planet is doomed, that climate change will do us in, and something must be done to “save earth.”

Myron has studied environmentalism for many years at CEI and he has been particularly active advising President Donald Trump on issues such as climate and the Paris Accords that Trump pulled out of. You may remember that as one of his initial acts when he took office. Myron is here to share his wisdom on a subject which is in the news every day, which is the wildfires. Perhaps even that is a misnomer.

We’ll learn about the wildfires that are raging in Australia and the really interesting correlation between the wildfires in Australia and the wildfires that have ravaged California over the past couple of years. They have common sources. The reason for these fires is not what you think. Myron, welcome to the show this morning.

Myron Ebell: Thanks for having me Bob.

The Origins of Fanatic Climate Activism

Bob Zadek: In a New York Times article going back right after Trump was elected you have been called a “climate criminal” and have been accused of destroying our future. I want to assure our audience that you are not on the air this morning talking to us from some air conditioned cell. You are not a climate criminal as the group will learn.

The concept in the New York Times of “destroying our future” made my head explode. How can anybody destroy the future? It’s impossible intellectually, but congratulations for being accused of trying to do that, whatever that may mean.

So welcome to the show this morning, Myron. You have been studying global warming — the bad science, the good science — and there is (needless to say), a very powerful, very well-funded active movement to protect us against climate change. Where did that come from? Have we lived for several thousand years not caring if earth is destroyed and all of a sudden thank heaven a movement has sprung up to save earth from total destruction? Give us a little insight. Where did that come from? Why are we even talking about this today?

Myron Ebell: The global warming bandwagon really got going in the early 1980s, and it really started in Sweden and then Germany. I’m following a book by an English author named Rupert Darwall, who wrote a book that is the best summary of the history.

The Swedes had various problems. One is that they’re very highly taxed. Their social wealth welfare system always needs more and more revenue. So they’re always looking for new taxes. A tax on carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas was something that they were looking at, particularly to move to nuclear power and also raise revenue.

Now, why would that be an attractive tax for Sweden? They’re heavily Lutheran. They have a social conscience. This is a tax on bad things, namely burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. So that’s where it really got started back in the early eighties. Germany was the next big step. And then in 1988 it hit the United States and it went global. We got the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is supposed to study climate science. And then we got in 1992, the Rio Earth Treaty, which is also called the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, during President Bush’s presidency.

Bob Zadek: What’s interesting about the climate change movement is that like almost every other similar movement — a “war on” this, a “war on” that – it is really a war on freedom, free choice, personal decision making and the like. Because inherent in the war on global warming, is the surrender of choice by businesses and by individuals – from the minuscule of what kind of light bulb you could use and how much water can come out of your shower head (these small, almost humorous compromises of freedom), to the big stuff like how we generate our power, how we build a power grid, etc.

This is the typically leftist characteristic that choice must be removed from individuals and businesses because the government is smarter. The select miniscule group of people in government know more about everything than the hundreds of millions of people who occupy the planet.

The Real Source of the Australian and Californian Wildfires

Bob Zadek: The wildfires in Australia, California, etc. have in common the taking over of land and forest management — removing it from individuals and from the owners of the land, to government with horrific and disastrous consequences.

What happened in Australia to cause the horrible fires that are still raging and spreading somewhat out of control?

Myron Ebell: The global warming folks were very quick to blame the catastrophe that is going on in Australia on global warming. However, there are two factors. One is that the kind of forests that they have in Australia, mainly eucalyptus, is very prone to fire when you get droughts. The fires are very quick and very hot and very destructive. Australia is a place that has droughts. It will have a number of years with an average or above average rainfall. Then it will have a period of two or three or four years of drought. We are in this third or fourth year of drought. It has been hot in Australia. Australia is a hot place. So Australia is subject to periodic bushfires.

The second thing is that these bushfires are much worse now because the environmental movement in Australia has convinced the government –and it’s not just the left, even the conservative party has convinced the government to stop and prohibit policies that minimize or control fires.

The main policy is what’s called “land clearing,” which involves prescribed burns very strategically in the winter that is in our summer, when it’s when it’s wet and cool. They will burn areas so that a big fire can’t get going.

The environmental movement in Australia has basically banned that practice. Once the fires get going, they just go and go and go.

Bob Zadek: Now, why would they ban a practice that is clearly demonstrated to be effective and an inexpensive way to take control of nature in a positive way? Why would the environmental movement oppose that? They should support it. So what’s the theory behind it?

Myron Ebell: Well, the theory is that whatever human beings do to the environment is bad. The environmental movement has basically sold that belief to urban people. Australia is heavily urbanized. 90% of the people I think live in about six or seven major cities. So it is highly urbanized and people who don’t have a whole lot of connection to nature are much more likely to believe what they’re told by the environmental movement — which has a very large megaphone — just keeps repeating that human activity is bad and natural activity is good.

“People who don’t have a whole lot of connection to nature are much more likely to believe what they’re told by the environmental movement.”

We have exactly the same thing going on in the West and in California. The fuel buildup is caused by gross mismanagement of our public lands – in particular, for example, stopping timber production in our national forests. This has led to exactly the same kind of environmental catastrophe that goes on every summer now in the Northwest and California, because the federal lands have huge fuel buildup. If you don’t cut the timber, it eventually will burn down. So we’re getting one environmental catastrophe after the other in the West. It’s the same mentality of the environmental movement in both countries.

Bob Zadek: Weren’t they complaining that if you start a fire, even, a controlled fire, which cannot spread, it creates CO2 so you are damaging the earth? It’s like burning a coal fired power plant. You are putting CO2 in the air and anything you do to put CO2 in the air – even if it’s for the right reason — that makes it per se an activity that should be discouraged. Isn’t that kind of their approach?

Myron Ebell: Yes, there’s another side to that which is that higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere has gone up from 270 parts per million to 400 parts per million today. So since 1800, it’s gone up from 270 to 400 parts per million. About one part in 2,500 in the atmosphere is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and so we should expect a little bit of warming, but the direct effect of higher CO2 levels is a greening of the earth because plants require CO2 in order to photosynthesize sunlight into caloric energy, the stuff we and cattle eat.

The greening of the earth is absolutely indisputable and of course that means that the forests are growing more. Every year we have higher crop yields in the green belt. Of course Australia has been greening up too, and so of course that leads to greater fires when there is one compared to when there was less green stuff on the ground. Al Gore denied that the earth is greening up. But if you go to the NASA website, you can find satellite photography that shows absolutely that the earth is greening up as a result of increasing CO2 levels.

Bob Zadek: When you read articles on wildfires, you will find the verb “spread” –the fire is spreading. The importance of my pointing that out is that controlled burns are designed to prevent that from happening. Isn’t the whole strategy of a controlled burn to isolate a forest fire so it cannot spread?

I watch a lot of submarine movies and in submarines and in ships in general, every time crew members move from part of a submarine or a ship to another, they close and seal the door behind them. So if there is a leak, the leak doesn’t spread the inflow of water to another part of the boat. So they isolate the damage. I also thought of epidemics, what did we do? We quarantined the carrier of the disease. We quarantined and it worked. We kept the people carrying the disease from spreading it.

Am I being too simplistic or is it accurate to say that the purpose of a controlled burn is to prevent its spreading?

Myron Ebell: That’s correct. Controlled burns are not a perfect science. They’re not always controlled. Sometimes they get out of control. There are many tools to manage our forests and our grasslands and our scrubland. You have a lot of Chaparral scrub-land on the California coast and prescribed burns are one of the tools. In the the big forests of the Northwest, Northern California, Western Oregon, and a little bit of a Washington state, the main thing to keep fires down is to actually actually have timber production and logging. A well-managed forest is not one that’s all grown up with brush and small trees, it is one that has big trees and a lot of open ground. And those big trees which are not all packed in together but are spread out are much more resistant to big fires. If you look at the Sierra Nevada, you’ll see millions of acres of dead trees that are just ready to go up in smoke and in a very hot fire. It’s because they’re too dense. It’s not really forest, it’s just heavy brush. These are very unhealthy and they’re really the result of gross environmental mismanagement demanded by groups like the Sierra Club.

Unhealthy Forests: A Product of Bad Science

Bob Zadek: Is maintaining a healthy forest the goal of environmentalism?

Isn’t it so obvious that the policies that presently seem to dominate governmental decisions are anti-healthy forests? How did the scientists who know how to make and keep a forest healthy not prevail?

Myron Ebell: Science has been on the retreat on environmental issues for a long time as a result of the size and power and the wealth of the modern environmental movement.

People still think of the environmental groups that came to life in the sixties and seventies as little grassroots groups. The big groups like this, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund — these groups all have budgets in excess of $100 million a year. Some of them are approaching $200 million a year. You can buy a lot of public relations and public opinion when you have that kind of money. What they’ve done for years is foster the belief that nature is really good when it’s just left to itself but when humans get involved everything goes haywire.

We still find parts of the world where forests are very healthy and beautiful and people love to go to them and they’re full of wildlife. For example the German forests, Switzerland, Austria, these are forests that are still heavily managed. Although that’s changing somewhat, they’re locking up larger and larger pieces, so they may be a couple of generations behind what’s going on in this country.

But when people go to Germany and they see some of these forests and they come back and say how beautiful they are — why can’t we have for us like that? Well, it’s because they’re very heavily managed. I’m not against having some areas not be managed — there is a place for true wilderness that isn’t managed — but by and large our national forests, and public lands were created to be managed.

It is really unfortunate that a lot of them aren’t in private hands because they would be much better managed today if they were in private hands rather than being owned by the federal government.

Comparing Australia and California

Bob Zadek: So in point of fact, the environmental movement is really bad for the environment. How strange is that?

In California, there are many similarities with Australia, both in terms of the natural similarities and forest management. So what should California learn from Australia, or vice versa? What are the similarities? What are they both doing wrong? You have partially explained about Australia. What is California doing wrong?

Myron Ebell: California has a climate that’s similar to southeastern Australia. It is a mediterranean dry climate subject to regular drought and to regular wildfires. The question is how can people live in that climate successfully? What’s happening now is everything that could be done wrong in California is being done wrong, even though a lot of people recognize what the problem is, which is that you have the chaparral on the coast. More and more people want to live out there.

But they don’t do the preventive actions that are necessary to save their homes when there’s a wildfire.

There are going to be wildfires in the chaparral country. This the brush land. Regardless of what you human beings do there will be fires and people need to be allowed to clear the land around their houses so when a brush fire comes through it won’t destroy their house. In Australia, the practice of protecting your own house if you live in a rural area has pretty much been prohibited by legislation. There is a very famous story you can find where a rural firefighter went against the law and cleared the land around his house and was fined $50,000 and had $50,000 court costs.

When the fire came his house was the only one that survived. People need to be allowed to keep the vegetative growth around their houses from getting too dense.

Bob Zadek: What’s incident in your story about the firefighter in Australia is that he was doing something on his own land for the purpose of protecting his home. That has to offend anybody who hears the story. Somebody is on their own land doing something that affects nobody other than the firefighter and his family, and the government fines him $100,000 dollars as a result.

That reminds me of a story I told on this show years ago. There was a landowner who lived on a mountain in one of the western states and he had no source of water other than rainwater.

He collected rainwater off his roof and it all ran down into cisterns. That was his source of water. He had these big pools of water and water tanks that held water. He was just collecting rainwater as a way to live on this mountaintop and the western state — I think it was Colorado, but I’m not certain of that. They fined him and convicted him of a crime for collecting rainwater. They said the rainwater belongs to the state and by collecting it for your own use, you are diverting state property. The rainwater should be allowed to run into the ground and into a river and the property of the state, even though firefighters said, “We use the water he collects when we have to put out fires in his area.” So that story just came to mind. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it. It was widely reported at the time and he actually was sentenced to jail for collecting rainwater because he said, “I’m not going to stop.”

Myron Ebell: There are numerous similar stories involving the Endangered Species Act in California where landowners were not allowed to farm their land to protect certain endangered species. The most famous one is the Stephens kangaroo rat in Southern California. The land owners involved were told, “You have to stop farming because when you plow the land you are likely to kill some endangered kangaroo rats.”

The result was that the brush grew up, there was a huge, very hot fire that went through the area. It destroyed some homes, and killed a lot of kangaroo rats because kangaroo rats really don’t like fire. They don’t do well in fire. That’s the kind of perverse incentive that the government provides to private property owners that leads to environmental destruction.

Logging: An Unfairly Demonized Industry

Bob Zadek: Another contribution to the intensity of wildfires is the attack on logging in Northwest Oregon and California. What is the theory? What made logging, which is nothing other than harvesting a crop, albeit a wooden crop, what made logging a pariah species, that logging was virtually closed up, destroying jobs? What was the effect of the ban on logging on forest management and wildfires?

Myron Ebell: It’s a long story but the most valuable and productive forests in the world for us are the Douglas Fir forests. Douglas fir is a tremendous tree. It grows in Western Oregon, Northern California, and Western Washington. These forests require clear cutting. Douglas fir will not reproduce. If you cut some of the trees and leave others so that the ground remains in shade, Douglas fir seeds will not grow up into trees. So what Douglas fir needs is clear cutting or in fact catastrophic fire that burns it all down. And so the environmental movement mounted a campaign against clear cutting and then they mounted a campaign to claim that a little owl called the Northern spotted owl was endangered because of timber production, because of logging.

The spotted owls needed these old growth forests and we had to stop cutting them. One campaign was against clear cutting. The other was total prevention of logging because of the spotted owl. Now, in fact, the spotted owl requires a lot of open ground because the squirrel it eats does not live in old growth forests where there is no sunlight on the ground, because of all the tree cover. So spotted owls actually are endangered in old growth forests. The environmentalists were correct about that, but that’s because they can’t actually survive in old growth forests. They need a second growth forest so it has a lot of open space so that the squirrels that they eat have something to eat.

So the whole thing has grown up as a result of complete miseducation about how the forests operate and what animals like the spotted Owl need to survive. The whole thing is basically a con game that has been perpetrated on the people who live in rural Northern California, Western Oregon. We closed down all the saw mills and now we burn up those forests rather than provide timber for the national economy.

Clear-Cutting: A Process to Thin the Forest

Bob Zadek: Explain clear-cutting for those of us who grew up on pavement and only saw a tree when we went to the arboretum or something like that.

Myron Ebell: You select and cut trees here and there and you leave a lot of the trees to create a healthy forest. Douglas Fir is different. It is the most valuable forest in the world. When you’re managing a Douglas fir forest, you have to go in and take it a section, a piece of ground, a few acres or it might be a few hundred acres, and you have to clear the whole area. You have to cut down all the trees, not just selective trees. When the environmental movement started showing photographs of clear cut ground and said this is monstrous that they’re just destroying this ancient forest, and they’re cutting down all the trees. Well, that is what Douglas Fir needs and that’s what never got through in the public debate.

Private Ownership of Forests: A Look at the Data

Bob Zadek: And there’s no recognition that even large, majestic Douglas Fir trees as well as redwoods are nothing other than a harvestable crop, which the land will recycle and you’ll constantly have new growth and you’ll have enough to have a forest.

We’re all reciting from memory, Joyce Kilmer I think, who said “I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. It’s as if everybody has memorized that and that’s what governs their decisions. What struck me as being strange in the whole government regulation of forest management is that some of the forests are owned privately. Paper companies own forest land, that’s their raw material or they have harvesting rights if they can still get them from public land.

Why in the world would the government not leave private forest management to the owners who are managing a forest for profit? If they do a bad job managing the forest, they will go out of business. Isn’t that the greatest control on good forest management? Is there data that indicates that private forests all better managed specifically with regard to forest fires, but other management measurements as well?

Myron Ebell: Bob, you got that exactly right. Private landowners have the correct incentives to take care of their land. If you have a resource on your land and if you don’t take care of it, you will lose the value of that resource. That’s why private ownership is the basis of sound environmental management and conservation. Public ownership is really the terrible thing about the West. I’m a rural Western or from, from Eastern Oregon. Oregon is over 50% federally owned. California is nearly 50% federal. Nevada is, is something like 85 or 87% federally owned. So what we have in the forests of the Northwest is mostly federal ownership. And the people who manage are not particularly bad people but they have the wrong incentives.

“If you have a resource on your land and if you don’t take care of it, you will lose the value of that resource.”

Whereas the big timber companies that own some of the Northwest and some of Northern California, they have the correct incentives and their forests are in better condition and they are less subject to catastrophic fires. They are more intensively managed than our national forests and our national parks. A lot of our national forests have been turned into wilderness areas. So you can’t manage that at all. These wilderness areas tend to become where the trouble starts, where disease hits and then they die. That’s where the fire starts. Private landowners are much better stewards of the environment because as you said, they have the correct incentives.

Bob Zadek: The environmental movement believes that nature must not be interfered with and that forests must be left alone with no human intervention, even positive. Forest fires are simply nature being nature. If you say “let nature take its course,” you are saying “let it burn.”

In this case the human intervention is using our wisdom to better manage our forests and not let nature alone control what the forests are like. My next observation is that the government equates to the political process. So when you let the government get involved you also let in lobbyists and movements that get people elected who control governmental action, and all the ugliness of this process. You get decisions based on popular will and fads. So the political will is leaning to the destruction of the forests because the goal of the environmental movement is not sound forest management but rather an economic goal. Did I get that right?

Myron Ebell: The problem we face is that the people who live in rural America are much better land managers and are much better protectors of the environment than people who live in the cities and contribute to the Sierra Club and get those lovely wildlife calendars. They have this belief that they’re smarter than the people who actually live and deal with the environment on a daily basis.

People who live in San Francisco and Los Angeles have more people than rural counties and they tend to be wealthier and they think they know more than the poor stupid people who live on the farm. And of course the truth is exactly the opposite. The problem with the environmental condition of the West now, and you see this in Australia, is that the people who live there and know how to manage their environment are constantly told by compulsory government programs that they have to do this and that even though these mechanisms will actually lead to environmental mismanagement and decline of species we are trying to protect. You’re seeing it now in Australia with the destruction of the forest killing all kinds of animals like wombats and koala bears.

Bob Zadek: I bemoan the loss of good old fashioned 18th-century federalism. This could be a perfect test. If forest management were turned over to the States, we would see that California would manage its forests differently than perhaps Montana, Wyoming, and by example, the best practices would be shown to be the best by actual side by side comparisons. But right now where we have environmental policy almost exclusively under the control of one federal government. There is no chance for as Brandeis said, the “laboratories of innovation,” where one state will experiment and discover a better way to do it. This is a classic example where good old-fashioned federalism would help us learn what’s the best forest management practice.

Myron Ebell: California doesn’t have much state forest. It has a fair amount of privately owned forest. Some States in the Rocky Mountains do have more state forests and by and large they are much better managed than the national forests. And one of the reasons is because in some of the Western States — the state forests and the state lands — have to be managed on a profitable basis because the money generated goes to support the school districts. They have an incentive that is much better attuned to good management than our national forests do.

So I favor privatizing the West. I think we need a lot more private land and a lot less federal land. But if we had to pick a middle alternative, state owned land rather than federal land is better. Private land is still better than state owned land. But if we can’t privatize the West, we at least ought to be talking about turning over federal lands to state management.

Bob Zadek: I couldn’t agree more. Tell us a bit about the Competitive Enterprise Institute and how our listeners can follow their work.

Myron Ebell: CEI was founded in 1984 by Fred Smith, a big government regulator turned into a free marketeer when he moved to Washington and saw how the EPA actually worked. He realized if you actually want to protect the environment, big government can’t possibly be the solution. So CEI was founded in 1984 as a free market group, but we’re not like some of the bigger ones. We focus almost exclusively on environmental regulation. We focus on environmental regulation, financial labor, antitrust. Any regulation, red tape or bureaucracy, CEI works on it. So you can find out about us at CEI.org.

Related Shows:

Richard Epstein on Climate Change
We Are Not Sardines. We Are People! With Jonathan Wood (Pacific Legal Foundation), March 9, 2014
Environmentalism- The Libertarian Way, with Dr. Mary Ruwart, July 24, 2011

Originally published at http://www.bobzadek.com on January 15, 2020.