RUTHFULLY YOURS

California has been in the headlines a lot lately. In the first half of the year, it hogged headlines because Governor Newsom imposed some of America’s most draconian lockdown rules on Californians (although they naturally didn’t apply to protests). While these headlines applied equally to other Democrat-run states, California blazed a new trail in August, when a heatwave caused the state to have rolling blackouts, followed by raging fires.

What was significant about both the blackouts and the fires was that they could have been prevented. Both resulted from California’s obsession with climate change and mindless environmentalism. Now, though, it appears that California is also due for an imminent apocalyptic flood. California can work to save itself, but it’s spending money in all the wrong places.

Although the media were excited about an allegedly record-breaking heatwave this August, the reality is that California has meltingly-hot heatwaves at least twice a year. To the extent some years are hotter than others, the temperatures differ by the single digits.

What made this year different was that the power grid failed over large parts of California. The grid didn’t fail, though, because the heat was too great. It failed because Pacific Gas & Electric company, a California public utility, has bowed to the climate change fanatics and put all of its energies into renewables. Even Governor Newsom had to concede that, when people needed A/C, solar energy failed.

The focus on climate change also meant that PG&E, instead of updating its aging power lines, some of which are almost 100 years old, poured its money into renewables. As always, it was these power lines that accounted for most of the fires that have turned California into an inferno. (The massive lightning storm didn’t help, but it was the power lines that set the state on fire.)

The other thing that set California ablaze was the environmentalist pressure not to do preemptive trimming and controlled burns. As he did in 2018, with the deadly Camp Fire in Butte County, President Trump criticized California’s forestry practices:

“I see again, the forest fires are starting. They’re starting again in California,” Trump said at a campaign event in Old Forge, Pa. “And I said, you’ve got to clean your floors. You’ve got to clean your forests.”

It’s not just Trump saying this. One of the worst fire areas this August was in Big Basin, California’s oldest state park, home to the spectacular coast redwoods. These trees are hundreds of feet tall and can be almost 2,000 years old. This year’s fire killed several of those trees – and it could have been avoided. Nine months ago, Portia Halbert, a Big Basin environmental scientist, was expressing concern about the fact that there hadn’t been a prescribed burn there in three years:

“Given the right conditions, we’re poised to have catastrophic wildfires all over California,” says Halbert, who works for the Santa Cruz District of the California State Park System. “So what’s my anxiety level like? I think we’ve been really lucky to avoid something very extreme here in the Santa Cruz Mountains.”

The third world power outages and devastating infernos in California are what the Obama administration might have called “man-caused disasters” if had hadn’t already used that term on terrorist attacks. They all could have been avoided.

However, it appears that there’s another imminent disaster that California should be preparing for rather than obsessing about the fact that the earth’s climate changes. A flood of Biblical proportions is waiting in the wings. A massive flood hit in the winter of 1861-1862, submerging the Central Valley in up to 15 feet of water:

When it was thought of at all, the flood was once considered a thousand-year anomaly, a freak occurrence. But emerging science demonstrates that floods of even greater magnitude occurred every 100 to 200 years in California’s precolonial history.

This matters beyond California because the Central Valley provides significant amounts of America’s food supply:

The state produces nearly all of the almonds, walnuts, and pistachios consumed domestically; 90 percent or more of the broccoli, carrots, garlic, celery, grapes, tangerines, plums, and artichokes; at least 75 percent of the cauliflower, apricots, lemons, strawberries, and raspberries; and more than 40 percent of the lettuce, cabbage, oranges, peaches, and peppers.

The state also produces a fifth of the nation’s milk. If California drowns, America starves. And yet the state, fussing about the ocean rising an inch in a hundred years, is doing nothing to harden its infrastructure against heavy rain. We already know from El Nino years, with their unusually heavy rainfall, that the state’s infrastructure has inadequate drainage.

California is what happens when politicians worship at the Altar of Climate Change. As they try desperately to appease a capricious God that’s responsible for it being too hot, too cold, too wet, or too dry, depending on how the auguries read, they’re utterly failing to protect California, and even the rest of America, against entirely predictable weather occurrences.