Biden of the Climate Apocalypse He gives a speech on wildfires and never mentions better forest management.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-of-the-climate-apocalypse-11600126352?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
Sometimes we wonder if Joe Biden writes anything in his public remarks other than the words “here’s the deal.” An example is the Democratic nominee’s big speech Monday on the West Coast wildfires in which he never mentioned the need for better forest management.
The younger Joe Biden would never have allowed that kind of political malpractice. But his handlers let him deliver a lengthy speech that blamed the fires, Hurricanes Laura and Sally, flooding on the coasts, a windstorm in the Midwest, and the hot summer, among other events, on “the fury of climate change everywhere—all this year and right now.” It’s as if he saw the apocalyptic climate-change melodrama of some years back, “The Day After Tomorrow,” and decided to become Dennis Quaid.
If that seems glib, how else to describe a speech that claims to revere science but is utterly detached from it? On the wildfires, Mr. Biden’s failure to mention the need to clear dry and diseased fallen trees defies what has gradually been recognized as a necessity even on the environmental left.
Decades ago the forestry consensus changed from active management to letting nature take its course. Controlled burns that once cleared rotting underbrush stopped. Logging that thinned forests declined amid green political opposition. One unintended result, especially in dry summers or extended drought, were millions of acres of brush that become fuel for raging fires. Add the spread of housing into more distant suburbs, and the risks to people and property have grown.
As even the climate-change true believers at the New York Times put it the other day: “Millions of Americans are moving into wildfire-prone areas outside of cities, and communities often resist restrictions on development. A century of federal policy to aggressively extinguish all wildfires rather than letting some burn at low levels, an approach now seen as misguided, has left forests with plenty of fuel for especially destructive blazes.” Does Mr. Biden’s campaign read the liberal papers?
Even Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom agrees on the need for better forestry. After the wildfires last year, his state agreed with the federal government to reduce the fire risks on a million acres a year of dry forest tinder for five years. Meeting with President Trump on Monday in California, Mr. Newsom disagreed on climate policy but said, “There’s no question” that “we have not done justice on our forest management. . . . I want to thank you for supporting that effort.”
As for climate and hurricanes, sigh, let’s repeat that there is little evidence that storm frequency and the modest global warming of the last century are linked. As scientist Roger Pielke Jr. has noted, hurricanes hitting the U.S. have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1900.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said “it is premature to conclude that human activities—and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming—have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.” The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it too lacks evidence to show that warming is making storms and flooding worse.
Yet here’s how Mr. Biden described Apocalypse Now on Monday: “The past 10 years were the hottest decade ever recorded. The Arctic is literally melting. Parts are actually on fire. What we’re seeing in America—in our communities—is connected to that. With every bout with nature’s fury, caused by our own inaction on climate change, more Americans see and feel the devastation, whether in big cities, small towns, on coastlines or in farmlands. It is happening everywhere. It is happening now.”
And they say Donald Trump exaggerates.
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Mr. Biden’s speech shows that on climate, as on so much else, Mr. Biden is no moderate. He’s adopted a climate policy that is far more extreme than prevailed in the Obama years. As he repeated Monday, he is proposing a vast spending and regulatory agenda to remake the U.S. energy economy.
His goals include carbon-free electricity by 2035 and “a 100% clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050.” He’d ask Congress to pass “an enforcement mechanism” with “clear, legally-binding emissions reductions.” This means either a carbon tax or tight mandated limits on fossil-fuel energy, or both.
He’d start by spending $2 trillion in four years—building 500,000 electric-vehicle charging stations, hiring 250,000 workers to plug abandoned oil-and-gas wells, and even building “an end-to-end high speed rail system that will connect the coasts.” California can’t even build this train from Bakersfield to the Bay Area.
All of this is more evidence that Mr. Biden lacks either the desire, or the will, to say no to the political left. If we can borrow a popular phrase these days, it’s a matter not only of policy but of character.
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