RUTHFULLY YOURS

“All these things are connected. This is a challenging time. But we’re up to this challenge.”

That was California Gov. Gavin Newsom back in 2020 when he was busy blaming “climate change” for the wildfires that erupted that year. “I quite literally have no patience for climate change deniers,” he said.

Four years later, Newsom is again blaming “climate change” for the fires ravaging Los Angeles.

But wait. If climate change really is to blame, why was California so obviously, so woefully, so inexcusably unprepared?

Someone needs to ask Newsom why the state didn’t spend the last four years aggressively clearing out underbrush to minimize the chances of a catastrophic wildfire. Why didn’t it carve out large and effective buffer zones to keep fires from reaching populated areas? Why wasn’t there a Marshall Plan-scale effort to build reservoirs so firefighters could get water from hydrants?

It’s not as though the state didn’t have plenty of warning. For decades, environmentalists have been screaming about how “climate change” was going to make wildfires more frequent, more all-consuming, and more deadly.

Yet in the very state where environmentalists hold all the levers of power, they dawdled and delayed, let bureaucratic red tape and environmental groups stall efforts to prepare for the worst, and put other ridiculous and massively expensive projects (such as the “bullet” train) at the front of the line.

And in the process, California has wasted fantastic sums of money.

In 2018, former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a $1 billion bill that was supposed to “prevent catastrophic wildfires and protect Californians.” Where did that money go?

A 2019 report from Newsom’s wildfire “strike force” said that “Over the next five years, the state will commit over $1 billion for critical fuel reduction projects, to support prescribed fire crews, forest thinning, and other forest health projects.”

Early in his term, Newsom launched the California Vegetation Treatment Program, which was advertised as a plan to speed environmental reviews for forest management projects.

But as the Washington Examiner shows in a devastating account of waste and mismanagement:

Those types of projects — such as thinning out dense clusters of trees and prescribed burns to remove the conditions necessary for fires to spread rapidly — have also been stifled by climate groups that regularly challenge them in court.

A Free Beacon review of the program’s latest data found that of the 525 approved projects spanning 666,450 acres, only 231 projects spanning just 6,000 acres have been completed. There are only two projects located in the Los Angeles metro area spanning 130 acres — a fuel reduction project proposed by the Los Angeles County Fire Department and a nonprofit watershed project — but both remain incomplete.

Newsom is hardly blameless. A report three years ago found that he’d been lying about his wildfire prevention efforts.

An investigation from CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom found the governor has misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention. The investigation found Newsom overstated, by an astounding 690%, the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities. Newsom has claimed that 35 ‘priority projects’ carried out as a result of his executive order resulted in fire prevention work on 90,000 acres. But the state’s own data show the actual number is 11,399.

Now we learn that he’d cut funding for wildfire and forest resilience by $101 million in the budget he approved last June, and millions from other programs designed to mitigate fire damage. Is that what Newsom meant when he said in 2019 that he’d “made wildfire prevention and mitigation a top priority since taking office”?

Newsom has been just as lackadaisical when it comes to building new water reservoirs, which you’d think would Job No. 1 in a state convinced that “climate change” will cause more droughts and wildfires.

In 2014, Californians overwhelmingly approved a $7.5 billion water bond proposal, nearly $3 billion of which was set aside to build new reservoirs. More than a decade later, not a single new reservoir has been built. Where has all that money gone?

To be clear, we don’t buy the climate-change-is-to-blame nonsense. As we noted last week, there’s no evidence that wildfires have become more common or deadly, despite constant claims to the contrary. (See: “Fire, Snow And A Storm Of Climate Nonsense.”

But Newsom and the rest of the leftist Democrats who run the state do. It’s their religion. Every time something bad happens in the state, they blame fossil fuels. They are endlessly warning that urgent responses are needed.

And yet, they’ve done next to nothing to protect their residents from what they repeatedly say is an existential crisis.

By their own words, they have convicted themselves of criminal negligence.