In a matter of hours, the entire town of Paradise, Calif., burned to the ground. The Camp Fire killed at least 32 people, destroyed more than 6,000 homes, and rendered 100 people currently missing. Roughly 500 miles south of Paradise are Ventura and Los Angeles counties, with multiple cities still under mandatory evacuation as the Woolsey and Hill fires rage on. In total, a quarter of a million Californians have been forced to evacuate their homes.
Something’s rotten in the state of California, and it’s not as easy a diagnosis as either side of the political spectrum would have you believe. President Trump is correct that California has suffered a crisis of mismanagement. Both state and federal agencies have been remiss in conducting controlled burns or manually thinning out at-risk forests. Even though Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott derided Trump’s recent remarks as “uninformed,” as recently as last year, Pimlott partially attributed forest mismanagement to the state’s increasingly destructive wildfires. Pimlott specifically blamed the state for failing to properly fund fire prevention and forest maintenance.
At the same time, the impact of climate change on California’s risk for fires in undeniable. Between California’s naturally warm, arid climate, thousands of acres of mismanaged forest featuring dead trees to act as tinder for wildfires, and climate change diminishing the state’s rainy season this year, California was a powder keg waiting to explode.
The Sierra Nevada, one the state’s most vital sources of water, this year had an average snowpack amounting to 36 percent of the 1981 through 2000 average. California’s precipitation has plummeted over the past two decades, with climate change exacerbating the state’s already dry air and ferocious Santa Ana and Diablo winds. While Trump and experts at the Little Hoover Commission are correct that the state is mismanaging the removal of dead trees, climate change is absolutely fueling these fires.
So let’s talk about the elephant in the room, fiscally responsible and feasible ways to crack down on climate change. Here’s one that the Left won’t like: nuclear energy.
California’s Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom oversaw a massive movement to effectively eradicate nuclear power in the state. As lieutenant governor, Newsom helped lead an aggressive push to close California’s last nuclear power plant, and he did so to nearly no criticism from the Left.
Nuclear energy, though, provides a disproportionate majority of the nation’s carbon-free electricity despite the government’s regulatory stranglehold. That’s why the Union of Concerned Scientists reported that more than one-third of the country’s nuclear plants are projected to close in the next decade. Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer, who calls himself an environmentalist, has openly opposed nuclear power, and whereas Democratic politicians are keen to spend much of their environmental political capital on attacking coal and businesses, most don’t advocate for nuclear as a replacement.
We’re never going back to a world without electricity. Industrialization, technology, and the rise of global capitalism have lifted billions from starvation and poverty. The Kumbaya factions of environmentalists who believe that we can rely on terribly inefficient forms of clean energy, such as geothermal, wind, and solar power, are living in a pipe dream. But we already have a scientific tool, refined and risk-reduced every year, to replace dirty-energy-fueling forest fires and rising sea levels. Even the United Nations has finally conceded that nuclear fission must become a mainstay of a long-term energy grid to prevent catastrophic climate change. Even though China bears an exorbitantly higher share of the global blame for exacerbated climate change, an American embrace of nuclear energy would posit more localized benefits than any other carbon tax, regulation, or virtue-signaling Climate Accords.
Government incompetence, as seen in California, has tangible, human costs. So does climate change. Conservatives rightly castigate the former. It’s time for us to start focusing on solutions for the latter.
