The irony of California’s onerous environmental regime is that the state’s burdensome laws are damaging the very environment they are meant to protect.

This fact has been on display during the wildfires in Los Angeles, where terrible policies combined with Democratic incompetence to create a situation in which blazes burned out of control for hours before firefighters could get a handle on the situation. Just a few months before these fires, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and California Democrats cut funding for forest management programs by $101 million.