The Patriot Post® · No, Climate Change Didn't Ignite Maui
At this point, it’s as predictable as thunder after lightning. In the wake of the nation’s most deadly wildfire in over a century, the inevitable blame game has ensued. And the leading culprit, according to the Leftmedia and Democrat politicians, is their favorite ideological bogeyman: climate change.
The Associated Press headlined: “Maui’s fire became deadly fast. Climate change, flash drought, invasive grass and more fueled it.” The New York Times headline was even more provocative: “How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.”
By the AP’s second paragraph, the article touts “experts” blaming climate change for causing “flash droughts” and “other extreme weather events.” Seeking to expand the climate change hysteria, postdoctoral researcher Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz from the University of British Columbia is quoted: “What these … catastrophic wildfire disasters are revealing is that nowhere is immune to the issue.”
The Times takes a similar approach, identifying the “cause” by the second paragraph: “The explanation is as straightforward as it is sobering: As the planet heats up, no place is protected from disasters.”
The Washington Post got in on the act as well, republishing an article from Bloomberg titled, “Maui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach.” While admitting that at the time of the article’s writing the Post didn’t “know exactly what sparked Maui’s fires,” that didn’t stop the Leftmedia outlet from still preaching the dogma of climate change alarmism, including a tellingly similar talking point to those of the AP and Times. “The long arm of global heating will find you, no matter where you are,” the Post ominously warns. It then concludes with this typical alarmist diatribe:
Most important, we must do everything we can to break our fossil-fuel addiction and stop pumping out the carbon that makes these disasters both more likely and more destructive. There’s no hiding from this truth or its consequences.
The trouble is that it’s not the truth.
Hawaii, like California, is suffering under leftist political environmentalism. And like California’s annual summer wildfires, which the Left continuously blames on climate change, the real culprit in Hawaii is indeed man-made, but it has nothing to do with carbon emissions and fossil fuels.
Poor natural resource management and an aging power infrastructure — mostly due to leftist politicians majoring in the minors and bowing to the fringe demands of environmental lobbyists — are responsible for the lion’s share of these natural disasters.
“Blaming this on weather and climate is misleading,” contends Clay Trauernicht, University of Hawaii at Manoa assistant specialist in Wildland Fire Science and Management. “Hawaii’s fire problem is due to the vast areas of unmanaged, nonnative grasslands from decades of declining agriculture.”
Trauernicht observes that with the decline of farming and ranching, which cleared roughly a million acres of land across the Hawaiian islands, unused land has become dominated by tropical untended grasslands. “Maui is now firmly in the post-plantation era,” he notes, “and the West Maui fires are only the most recent example of what eventually happens when large, tropical grasslands go untended.”
So, ironically, human neglect in letting nature run wild is the actual problem. Instead of the pricey fight against the climate change bogeyman, Trauernicht contends that there are a few rather inexpensive and concrete actions that can mitigate the problem of massive wildfires in Hawaii. “Livestock are incredible tools to keep fire risk down,” he explains. “We can plant other things — active agricultural lands don’t burn (or they burn when we want them to) and restoring forest cover and riparian vegetation can limit the potential for fires to spread.”
The reality is and always has been that the climate on planet earth is in flux and changing. What mankind has done in the past, and indeed what we should be focusing on today, is not to try to stop global climate change, as that is akin to spitting into the ocean. Rather, humans can and should adapt. We can manage immediate natural conditions around us, such as practicing better forest or grassland management.
We need to be looking for particular solutions that aren’t dependent upon making the impossible happen, like ending all use of fossil fuel or transitioning to a power grid entirely sourced by renewable energy.
It’s time to stop blaming climate change and start looking and working toward practical solutions that don’t needlessly burden people with ridiculous regulations that just make life more expensive and more difficult. The more than 100 lost Hawaiian lives are a testament to that.