BY TOM MCCLINTOCK
Representative, CA-5
When Juan Cabrillo dropped anchor in what is now Los Angeles’s San Pedro Bay in the autumn of 1542, he promptly named it the Bay of Smokes. Annual wildfires fanned by Santa Ana winds are nothing new in Southern California. This is how nature gardens. She doesn’t care whose lives are destroyed, whose homes are burned, or how long it takes to reclaim the scarred land.
We mortals do. Throughout most of the 20th century, we took measures to minimize the frequency and severity of wildfires. We created land-management agencies to do some of the gardening ourselves. We removed excess timber, creating resilient, fire-resistant forests, thriving mountain economies and a lucrative source of public revenue. We leased public lands to sheep and cattle ranchers whose stock kept brush from building up. We established competent infrastructure to stop fires from getting out of control. We cut firebreaks into the soil to contain flames.
Prior to 1800, California lost an average of around 4.5 million acres to fires every year. As we introduced scientific land-management and fire-suppression measures, by the end of the 20th century that average dropped to around 250,000 acres.
But in 2020 California suffered a single-year loss of 4.3 million acres to wildfires. Between 2019 and 2023, an average of more than 1.5 million acres burned each year. What happened?
The left blames a changing climate. But that doesn’t explain California’s long history with massive wildfires, or why fires became less threatening throughout most of the 20th century.
We can find a more likely culprit in the states’ recent extreme environmental and social policies.
Environmental studies required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 now cost millions of dollars and take an average of 5.3 years for forest-thinning projects in California to get approved. Often the cost amounts to more than the value of the timber itself. The amount of timber harvested from public lands has declined around 75% since the 1980s, with a concomitant increase in forest acreage destroyed by wildfire.
Sheep and cattle grazing on public lands, once common in Southern California, has largely been regulated out of use by bureaucratic restrictions and fees designed to discourage the practice. Wilderness restrictions make brush suppression more difficult throughout much of the state.
Environmental leftists promised that laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Wilderness Act and the Endangered Species Act would protect and improve the environment. Fifty years later we’re entitled to ask: How’s it going? Between 2012 and 2021, we lost a quarter of California’s forestland to wildfires. A UCLA study estimated that California’s 2020 fires released twice as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as had been prevented by the previous 18 years of primarily government-enforced restrictions.
Resource policy also changed radically. The visionary water projects of the 20th century gave way to increasingly restrictive conservation edicts while leftist officials neglected the region’s basic water infrastructure. Authorities forced utilities to spend billions on wind and solar projects, money that could have otherwise funded such desperate priorities as fireproofing power lines. As a result, one of the states most heavily invested in wind power has to shut down its power lines on windy days. As a consequence of these follies, hydrants failed, and many overextended firefighters reported having no choice but to surrender to the blaze.
Despite sky-high taxes and government spending, Los Angeles’s woke officials still can’t spare proper funding for its Fire Department. Under Mayor Karen Bass, the city cut its already underfunded budget by more than $17 million last year. Meanwhile, the city spends almost twice as much as the fire department’s budget on homelessness projects. These projects are strained by the state’s illegal-migrant problem, which is fueled in part by Los Angeles’s designating itself a sanctuary city. Local officials seem more concerned with social justice than putting out real fires.
State-imposed price controls on fire-insurance premiums have destroyed that industry too. Premiums assign a dollar value to the risk of living in an area. As the risk increases, so do the premiums. But not in California, where regulators have limited companies’ ability to set market premiums. These price controls do what they always do: distort the price signals consumers need to make rational decisions and create shortages of whatever is being controlled. Fire insurers can no longer charge sufficient premiums to cover their risk, leaving them with no choice but to exit the market.
Fire is a condition of nature, but how we deal with it is a choice. The tragedy in Southern California is the result of decades of self-destructive policies made by foolish politicians. We can change the policies that got us into this mess by throwing out the politicians who made them. Let’s hope we do so before the next big fire.
McClintock (R-El Dorado Hills) represents California’s Fifth Congressional District.
This opinion piece originally appeared in the Jan. 13 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
