Green activists have hurt the environment by letting Hawaii and California burn

Barack Obama’s first White House chief of staff famously declared: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” His point has become a cynical tactic of the left ever since.

Any time there is a tragedy — capitalize on people’s suffering and despair to advance your political agenda.

It’s in keeping with this doctrine that we hear the rant that climate change was the match that lit the fires.

The New York Times shamelessly ran this headline: Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii into a Tinder Box.

The White House has similarly blamed the Canadian and California wildfires on climate change.

This is fake news.

There were many contributing factors to those fires.

The hot and dry weather and high winds were certainly a major factor.

Mother Nature periodically erupts with ferocity, and only a fool would believe that any government policy would have changed the heat or wind gusts in the Pacific Ocean.

But what could have prevented the near-100 deaths, the loss of thousands of homes and the billions of dollars of property damage was better planning for just this kind of event.

That risk mitigation didn’t happen despite years of warnings by climate experts, the utility companies and local residents.

Why didn’t it? Well, herein lies the real scandal of the Hawaii fires.

As The Wall Street Journal explained: “Four years ago, the utility company said it needed to do more to prevent its power lines from emitting sparks. It made little progress, focusing on a shift to clean energy. Between 2019 and 2022, it invested less than $245,000 on wildfire-specific projects on the island, regulatory filings show.”

Last year, according to CNN, “Hawaiian Electric asked the state Public Utilities Commission to allow it to spend $189 million” to “protect against wildfires and downed power lines.”

Hawaiian Electric repeatedly warned that “the risk of a utility system causing a wildfire ignition is significant.”

Yet the money that WAS spent on fire mitigation was less than 1% of what was recommended.

Almost every fire expert now acknowledges downed power lines ignited the fires.

This was precisely the same thing that turned California into a tinder box and charred more than 5 million acres of land.

So why wasn’t the money spent to prevent this tragedy? The answer is partly gross government mismanagement.

But the climate-change activists played a role here too, by persuading the politicians that the state and the utility must spent tens of millions trying to meet a foolhardy 2015 mandate requiring 100% of the utility’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2045.

Does anyone believe that if the state had more windmills and solar panels that these horrific fires would not have ravaged the island?

It wasn’t our fossil-fuel use that caused the fires. It was climate-change alarmists who demanded all the money go to green energy rather than saving at-risk homes and lives.

There is a bitter irony to this whole story.

It turns out that in recent years the forest fires in California and Canada and now Hawaii have emitted so much carbon into the planet’s atmosphere that they have undone most of the supposed benefits of the hundreds upon hundreds of billions of dollars the United States has spent to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions over the past decade.

In other words, if we simply took a small fraction of the money governments spend on wind and solar and batteries and taking away people’s cars, gas stoves and pizza ovens and instead spent the money on better forest management, we would be doing more to clean the air.

And we’d be saving many more lives — of humans and animal life and trees. Isn’t that the objective of a true “green” agenda?

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economist at FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of the book “Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy.”