California Democrat polices increase atmospheric CO2: fires edition

California's fires aren't due to climate change.  That's obvious because no one, not even the most radical scientists, say that the temperature in California has changed dramatically in the last 2 to 3 years when these fires have become worse.

What has changed is that instead of properly managing forests and allowing logging the ecofreaks who run California have let the forests be.  That results in a massive build up of flammable materials which is the real cause of the large recent fires.

Historically logging, controlled burns, and other techniques kept the flammable mass of forests down so that fires wouldn't be so catastrophic. Similarly the Democrats have refused rate increases requested by PG&E to pay for clearing flammable materials away from power lines.

Democrats response to the fires has been to blame nature rather than their own destructive policies and to demand that millions of Californians go without electricity rather than return to the proven policies of the past.

As is usual for modern Democrats they are prioritizing Gaia over people. They're more worried about the trees than about the millions of Californians who are suddenly living in the Third World where power is a luxury.

But the really amazing thing is that as a consequence of their "green" policies they're actually putting far more CO2 into the atmosphere than would have gone their if the previous forest management policies would have been continued.

"However, over time the fire-prone forests that were not thinned, burn in uncharacteristically destructive wildfires, and the resulting loss of forest carbon is much greater than would occur if the forest had been thinned before fire moved through. By the end of ten to fifteen years, with the assumptions that were used in the analysis, failing to thin leads to a greater greenhouse gas burden than the thinning created in the first place, and that doesn’t even account for the avoided fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions due to the production of energy from the forest thinnings. In the long term, leaving forests overgrown and prone to unnaturally destructive wildfires means there will be significantly less biomass on the ground, and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."

As is often the case Democrats govern based on emotions not facts so that the consequences of their policies worsen the problem they're trying to solve.