August 9, 2018
Smackdown: Adam Schiff gets schooled on his California green canards
By Monica Showalter
There's nothing more satisfactory than a sanctimonious jackass getting schooled on his own canards.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California is a California Democrat who fits that sanctimonious jackass part.
And enter Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, who schooled him good.
See, the left has been spreading the flammable rubbish that as California burns, it's not the green left's fault. It's global warming's fault, see, so let's have more green regulation. California's Jerry Brown, who runs the place, is the prime propagator of this dreck, but Schiff is happy to be his dutiful parrot. Strassel presented him with a Deep State document showing that even the Deep Staters could see that the problem with the fires was too much uncleared fuel for them left lying around, what with 129 million uncleared dead trees. Those trees are left up to keep the environmental wackos happy.
Yet truth never deterred Schiff, who snottily hectored President Trump in claiming that environmental regulations had nothing to do with the sudden upswing in vast forest fires, which are threatening California's suburbs.
Environmental protections have nothing to do with the wildfires in CA. Climate change does. We're not going to let you use fires as an excuse to clear-cut our forests.
Umm, Adam? The fires are clear-cutting California's forests. No need to get Trump involved, let alone blame him. Clear-cutting is happening whether you like it or not; all you can do is choose whether you want it done orderly or you like the current free-for-all system, blaming global warming.
And Strassel's Journal itself (in an editorial she probably wrote, because she pinned the tweet) points out exactly why.
Number one: President Trump was right that water is wasted over the fire issue in a certain sense. He may not have the details right about there being no water in the fire hoses, but he is right that water is being wasted to fight fires that could be irrigating crops and land.
But every gallon of water used to extinguish fires won't be available for Californians amid a severe water shortage, which has been exacerbated by wasteful environmental policies.
Two: Measures to protect the Delta Smelt, a non-native fish, have contributed to the dry tinderbox conditions that invite fires:
The state Water Resources Control Board last month proposed additional restrictions on water deliveries. While most major wildfires this season have been in the north due to heavy winds, lower levels of irrigation in the Central Valley and Southern California contribute to drier, more combustible land conditions.
Three, environmental wackos refuse to allow any dead forest-clearing, screaming, as Schiff does, that Republicans just want to clear out all trees. That lays out more fuel for fires.
The Little Hoover Commission, an independent state oversight agency, explained in a February report that "a century of fire suppression remains firmly entrenched within federal and state firefighting agencies and has left forest floors deep in flammable groundcover."
Four, the state is addicted to "green pork" and shovels that on thick as firefighting equipment gets rusty and broken.
This year the Democratic legislature appropriated a mere $30 million of cap-and-trade revenues for fuel reductions on 60,000 acres of forest land. They allocated $335 million for electric vehicle subsidies. Democrats have also spent billions on high-speed rail, but only this year did they get around to appropriating $101 million to replace a dozen or so Vietnam War-era helicopters unequipped with modern technology that enables night-flying for fire-fighting.
Disgusted yet? What a fine thing that Strassel has the right ammo and is willing to use it against the canards of Schiff. Just put the government reports before him. He loves big government, are we right?