Scorched Earth: How Green Ideals Have Failed California’s People and Forests

In the wake of the fires that ravaged Southern California in recent weeks, some folks are unfortunately attempting to score easy political points from the devastation. But a sober look at these wildfires reveals that they were not caused by climate change. They are a normal part of the state’s natural, historical weather patterns, and the damage they have caused shows why California must replace symbolic and ineffective policies with those based on rational risk management and science.

Municipal, state and federal government officials should have foreseen and better planned for these regular events. The explosive nature of the current California wildfires is the expected result of the mismanagement of budgets and natural resources, poor planning and flawed policy frameworks. While not alone in its ability to confuse ideology for serious management techniques, California provides an excellent example of how decades of misguided priorities are beginning to snowball, diverting limited resources away from human health and well-being.

The Climate Change Narrative

Climate anxiety drives much of the wildfire narrative in California and nationwide. In early January, CNN’s Brianna Keilar interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann about the factors underlying this year’s fires. “Fifteen of the worst 20 wildfires,” Mann argued, “have occurred during the last 15 years in California.” He pointed to a trend of “faster-spreading, hotter-burning, more destructive, more deadly wildfires,” arguing that while the Santa Ana winds are a key weather factor, the real cause of the wildfires is “definitely related to a trend of drier conditions in California and the western U.S. caused by human-caused warming, due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels.”

Tagging global warming as the cause of wildfires may garner headlines, but it incorrectly encourages government officials to avoid on-the-ground adaptation measures and budget changes that could reduce fire risk and improve fire response plans. While Mann recognizes the role of the Santa Ana winds (or the weather) in the fires, he still defaults to the “human-caused warming” canard. Even if we accept his claims at face value, his proposed solutions—“reduced fossil fuel dependence,” congressional support for wholly ineffective measures such as the Inflation Reduction Act and continued participation in international climate plans such as the Paris Agreement—would take decades, or even, according to an MIT professor of ocean geography, “centuries to millennia,” to make an impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

Mann’s climate change charge highlights several issues. First, it ignores or downplays California’s measured climate, which is known to have extended periods of drought followed by short bursts of intense precipitation and extreme weather events. By studying “tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence,” scientists have documented megadroughts in the region lasting as long as 240 years. News archives indicate that wildfires have often plagued the state. “Terrible conflagrations,” “high Santa Ana winds,” fire “like a mad dog” and “huge flames” that were “raging very fiercely” were reported in 1868, 1874, 1875, 1883, 1885, 1891, 1917, 1929, 1935, 1936, 1938, 1956, 1961, 1964, 1965 and 1970. One 2023 article described how “Tens of thousands of years ago, before the last ice age ended,” wildfires “fueled extinctions in Southern California.” It followed with the provocative question, “Will it happen again?”

Former University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke cited the U.S. Drought Monitor to show that California has experienced several intense droughts over the past century. Immediately following extended periods of drought from 2012 to 2019 and again from 2021 to 2022, the state saw precipitation levels in 2023 and 2024 that had not been seen since the late 1800s. Heavy rains led to abundant plant growth, which became parched in late 2024 as dry conditions returned. Abundant dry fuel combined with extremely strong, but not unusual, Santa Ana winds—the winds in 2011 were stronger—to create the perfect weather conditions for wildfires in December and January.

Reducing the issue to climate change also distracts from the need to focus on proper forest and natural area management. Southern California has experienced growing levels of fuel loading in the natural areas around homes and human infrastructure—areas known as the “wildland-urban interface.” The tendency to blame not-unprecedented extreme weather events and wildfires on climate change also shifts attention away from far more immediate, actionable solutions, such as maintaining and adequately funding essential water and electricity infrastructure.

Forest Management Practices and the Wildland-Urban Interface

California’s focus on climate change compounds the state’s tendency toward preservationist policies that actively discourage practical resource management steps such as logging, spacing, thinning, brush reduction and prescribed burns. At the same time, forest and natural area managers nationwide have a history of immediately suppressing fire. When only the past few decades are considered, the result appears to be a worrying, climate-change-induced increase in the total number of acres burned. However, a longer view of fire history demonstrates that U.S. wildfires have dropped dramatically over the past century, both in number and total acres burned.

It’s not confusing. We know more active forest management would help reduce fire events. Even methods as uncomplicated and low-impact as using goats to reduce shrub and grass levels could be more widely employed in steep, sensitive areas. Active management would also result in healthier and more viable forests, as dense and overmature vegetation would be removed and fuel loads would be reduced, especially in the wildland-urban interface.

Areas in and around Los Angeles that have been heavily affected by this year’s fires, such as the Pacific Palisades, provide a prime example of the wildland-urban interface, where natural settings surround and intermix with expensive real estate and infrastructure. Suburbia, once dominated by pavement, is increasingly marked by green spaces and nature preserves. As more people live in these wildland-urban interface areas, there are more opportunities for fires to start, according to recent research published in the journal Science Advances.

The Devastating Impacts of Restrictive Environmental Regulations

California is well-known for its restrictive regulations, from banning the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035 to hazardous materials labeling requirements and costly energy-efficiency building codes. Bureaucratic delays and restrictions are the norm in the Golden State, and attempting to preserve natural areas in as close to an untouched condition as possible is an expected outgrowth of that red-tape worldview.

However, these policies work together to prevent active forest and land management, leading to increasingly dense vegetative cover and heightened wildfire intensity. California’s wildfires are the predictable result of overgrown natural areas, but limiting lawsuits and streamlining environmental reviews could help expedite fire mitigation projects.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently suspended permitting and review requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act and the Coastal Act to allow more rapid reconstruction of the homes and businesses damaged by the wildfires. While helpful, Newsom’s actions also demonstrate a recognition of how the state’s oppressive regulatory climate slows maintenance and development. If these ostensibly essential environmental protections can be quickly set aside to speed rebuilding, Californians should ask if they are truly necessary.

Restrictive environmental policies also drive poor budgeting decisions and ensure that essential utilities and infrastructure are not adequately maintained or fail to work when they are most needed. For example, in 2019, the California Coastal Commission fined the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power almost $2 million for failing to obtain a permit before completing essential maintenance and “repairs of utility equipment to reduce the risk of sparking wildfires.”

Ironically, the work for which the LADWP was fined occurred in the Pacific Palisades Highlands, an area heavily damaged by this year’s fires. In mid-January, The New York Times reported that “at least one lawyer investigating the fire was looking at whether a downed utility line could have sparked it, since power lines run north and south” near the area burned by the Palisades Fire this year. The Times also highlights the “long history of catastrophic blazes caused by downed power lines.”

But, as the LADWP attempted to build a road into the area in 2019, the state’s Coastal Commission served it with a cease-and-desist order, describing how the utility’s actions had affected a 9.15-acre area and “182 individual specimens” of milkvetch, an endangered plant species. In striking contrast, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) website indicates that, as of Jan. 24, the Palisades Fire had killed 11 people, injured 4, destroyed more than 6,800 structures, damaged almost 1,000 structures and affected an area of over 23,000 acres. (The Cal Fire website does not estimate the number of “individual specimens” of milkvetch that the intense fires harmed.)

The Sad State of Budget Priorities and Preparedness

One Fox News story reported that statewide firefighting budgets had recently been cut by $100 million. Newsom’s office pushed back, calling the report a “ridiculous lie.” However, additional reporting revealed that while Cal Fire’s budget had grown from $2 billion in 2019 to $3.8 billion during Newsom’s term, wildfire and forest resilience funding had been cut by $101 million in the last year. Programs cut included a “home hardening” program to protect homes from wildfires and various state conservancies designed to improve wildfire resilience.

While overall state spending on fires has increased during Newsom’s term, numerous reports indicated that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass cut the city’s fire department budget by $17.6 million between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 fiscal years. Those cuts prompted L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley to prepare a memo to the Board of Fire Commissioners in December 2024 stating that budget cuts “have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations” and hampered the city’s preparedness for the fires “to a certain factor.”

Bass pushed back at a press conference in January as the wildfires raged, arguing, “There were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days.” However, in another interview, Crowley said the city had “over 100 fire apparatus out of service” and pointed out that those vehicles and the mechanics needed to keep them repaired “would have helped” LAFD firefighters as they battled the fires. “I rang the bell,” explained Crowley, “that these additional cuts could be very, very devastating for our ability to provide public safety.”

Mismanagement of California’s Electrical Grid and Water Infrastructure

Questionable development priorities on the part of the state’s utilities have prioritized spending billions on solar energy infrastructure, potentially affecting maintenance budgets for aging electrical grids. The New York Times has highlighted how the LADWP tried in 2019 to replace power poles that date back to the 1930s with newer metal poles—a project that stalled in the wake of the revelation about the department’s damage to the milkvetch plant. This is a sad reminder of California’s backward priorities. Investing in infrastructure upgrades and reliability measures, such as burying power lines or upgrading aging distribution lines with newer metal poles, would be far more effective in reducing fire risks than prioritizing more solar projects.

The Science Advances research mentioned earlier indicates that over the past seven decades, “100% of [Santa Ana wind] fires were human-caused, and in the past decade, powerline failures have been the dominant cause.” Poorly maintained power lines have sparked fires, such as the Camp Fire, which devastated Paradise, California, in 2018. In the case of the Camp Fire—as in many other cases—dead and dying trees on federal land, as well as dense shrubs and grasses, threatened adjacent state and private land. During dry seasons, this unmanaged land can become an extreme fire hazard and can be an entry point for disease and insect infestations. This year’s fires appear to have followed a similar pattern, with the added pressure of the powerful Santa Ana winds whipping hot spots into intense conflagrations as well as spreading sparks and ash downslope into built-up areas.

Reporters have compiled a growing list of failures by government officials. The Santa Ynez Reservoir had been drained and offline for almost a year before the fires began. The 117-million-gallon reservoir, located just upslope of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, was taken offline when a tear in the reservoir’s cover threatened to contaminate the water supply. City officials pointed to the “process of contracting a company to carry out the repairs” as the reason for the extended outage. “To commission the support and resources to implement repairs to Santa Ynez,” read their statement, “LADWP is subject to the city charter's competitive bidding process, which requires time.”

Fixing the Failures

California’s wildfire crises are not the product of an uncontrollable climate emergency but the predictable result of decades of mismanagement and policy failures. By prioritizing green ideology and political decisions over practical, results-driven solutions, California’s leaders have left the state vulnerable to the devastating fires it is experiencing today. Neglected infrastructure, restrictive regulations and underfunded firefighting services have compounded the risks of natural weather patterns and overgrown forests.

Rather than blaming climate change and doubling down on ineffective policies, California should embrace more proactive natural area management techniques, streamline bureaucratic bloat and refocus limited resources on maintaining reliable water and power infrastructure. These measures would do far more to ensure public safety and environmental health. While certainly induced by California’s normally warm, dry climate and bouts of extreme weather, these wildfires have been amplified by poor policy choices. The intense fires have far more to do with leadership failures than carbon dioxide emissions. It’s time for the state to step away from symbolic gestures and return to sound, science-based management that protects its people and forests.