Trump challenges the 'gross mismanagement' of the forest by environmental wackos

Charles Hurt:

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“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” the Presidential Thumbs proclaimed. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests.”

And, if that wasn’t incendiary enough, Mr. Trump added a startling rebuke of the California overseers of said forest management: “Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Now, in this age when everybody is a victim it is not routine for a politician to threaten an entire state of victims while wildfires are still churning through their state. In most cases, politicians usually prefer to just pick up the fiddle and fiddle away. While California burns.

Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has never been much of a fiddler. It is usually his style to look at such carnage and go charging off in search of who is to blame and how the problem might be fixed.

With good reason, it turns out.

Despite all the caterwauling from so-called “environmentalists” trying to pin the blame for the wildfires on global warming, it turns out that there are far more urgent and relevant culprits.

Namely, forest management. Just like President Trump said.

Crystal Kolden, a professor of fire science at University of Idaho writing in the virulently anti-Trump New York Times, confirmed Mr. Trump’s fury over forest mismanagement.

Not only has this incompetence “created an abundance of fuel scattered across many of our forests,” Ms. Kolden wrote, it makes “the fires that do rage out of control — like the Camp Fire in Northern California and the Woolsey Fire near Los Angeles — much deadlier.”

Such poor management includes the failure to perform prescribed burns in more populated areas such as in California. That poor management extends to the massive tracts of national forests in places like Colorado where so-called “environmentalists” use court challenges to prevent any logging, which curtails the natural spread of killer beetles and removes freshly killed standing trees.

Without select cutting or timbering, what remains is a tinderbox that will — eventually — go up in a plume of smoke that the so-called “environmentalists” will then claim as evidence somehow of their kooky religion.

“With hotter and drier weather on the way, forest fires will be a part of life for tens of millions of Americans for the foreseeable future,” Ms. Kolden wrote. “We need a new way to deal with them — not just better management, as the president suggests, but an entirely different approach to where and how we live in fire-prone areas.”
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Those responsible for this mismanagement must change their attitudes are be replaced.   The lives lost and the environmental damage caused by their failed policies can no longer be tolerated.  I am sure that lowering the temperature by a fraction of a degree decades from now as proposed by the Paris accord would have done nothing to save these people or their homes.  It will take on the ground management of the forest to remove to worst of the fuel for these fires.

One of the problems with the left when it comes to Trump is an automatic reaction of disbelief when he says things.  He is not wrong about the forest management and they need to reconsider their position.