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This post, written by Amanda Terkel, originally appeared on Think Progress
Last night, CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck blamed California's massive wildfires on the "damn environmentalists" and their "bad environmental policies." He also claimed that global warming has nothing to do with the situation, stating,
To prove his points, he brought on R.J. Smith of the Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute and Chris Horner, author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism. Horner -- who is also a senior fellow at CEI -- predictably argued that "[g]lobal warming is not a likely suspect" for the fires and Smith said that "the greens have made things worse by stopping all [fuels] management." Watch it to your right.
These claims have been echoed by the right-wing blogs. Michelle Malkin blamed "litigious environmentalists" for "standing in the way" of Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative (HFI).
In 2002, Bush proposed HFI, which advocated "thinning" forests to decrease the risk of wildfires. But more than anything else, it was an attempt to curry favor with the timber and logging industries, which donated more than $1 million to Bush's 2000 campaign. HFI allowed loggers to cut down large, valuable trees miles from at-risk communities, allegedly in order to finance the removal of the smaller brush that fuels wildfires.
Environmentalists don't oppose removing brush and chapparal in at-risk areas, but logging in backforests has nothing to do with wildfire prevention. Removing brush is not a solution in itself. A 2006 study by Prof. A.L. Westerling, et al. concludes that addressing global warming needs to go hand-in-hand:
[L]arge increases in wildfire driven by increased temperatures and earlier spring snowmelts in forests where land-use history had little impact on fire risks indicates that ecological restoration and fuels management alone will not be sufficient to reverse current wildfire trends.
Earlier this year, the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC wrote that "a warming climate encourages wildfires through a longer summer period that dries fuels, promoting easier ignition and faster spread." Los Angeles went 150 days without measurable rainfall this past year, and such drought will likely get worse. A group of leading British climate scientists found that extreme drought will affect about a third of the planet and spread across half of the earth's land surface by 2100 because of global warming.
The Center for American Progress's Daniel J. Weiss has more about global warming's effects on wildfires.
UPDATE: Michael Roston at Huffington Post points out that in June, government auditors warned the Bush administration about shortcomings in its firefighting plan.
UPDATE II: Joe Romm at Climate Progress and Adam Siegel at EnergySmart have more.
Tagged as: global warming, environment, malkin, conservatives, california wildfires, glenn beck
Amanda Terkel is Deputy Research Director at the Center for American Progress and serves as Deputy Editor for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress.
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