A DEI Green New Deal Hydrogen Bomb – Watts Up With That?

From American Thinker

That’s how Victor David Hanson describes this week’s catastrophic wildfires in California.

“It was a total systems collapse from the idea of not spending money on irrigation, storage, water, fire prevention and forest management, a viable insurance industry, a DEI hierarchy, you put it all together and it’s something like a DEI Green New Deal hydrogen bomb… Gavin Newsom was fiddling, he’s almost Nero Newsom. And this has been something that is just unimaginable… The systems breakdown. And to finish, what we’re seeing in California is a state with 40 million people. And yet the people who run it feel that it should return to a 19th century pastoral condition. They are de-civilizing the state and de-industrializing the state and de-farming the state. But they’re not telling the 40 million people that their lifestyles will have to revert back to the 19th century, when you had no protection from fire… You didn’t have enough water in California. You didn’t have enough power. You didn’t pump oil. So we are deliberately making these decisions not to develop energy, not to develop a timber industry, not to protect the insurance industry, not to protect houses and property. And we’re doing it in almost a purely nihilistic fashion.”

And any honest accounting underscores the truth of his assessment.

LA is burning. And the derelict people responsible are worried that they are found out as charlatans and empty suits. The leftwing voters who enabled them are getting angry over the inferno that their chosen politicos green-lighted — as if they are shocked, shocked by the consequences of their voting. 

Here are just some of the most glaring examples of the misgovernance of California which contributed to the catastrophe, in case your source of news brushes past them with feature stories of loss and nonsense about climate change. (Average annual rainfall in California has remained unchanged since the late 19th century and California has not been in drought conditions since 2022. Sometimes it does rain in California. Sometimes it does not. Therefore, particularly wise management of water resources is necessary and that has been ignored.) It has not created or maintained existing water reservoirs, it has not created fire breaks, it has forbidden the removal of dry brush in its forests. The people holding elective office have demonstrated indifference and incompetence to the citizens of the state. A week before the fires broke out, a fire weather watch was declared. The mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass (a long time Castro fan) left anyway for a junket in Ghana which hardly ranks among her job duties. Her deputy mayor for public safety was on leave after the FBI raided his home “allegedly for making a bomb threat against City Hall earlier this year.” 

On her very first day in office, the mayor allocated $1.3 billion to address homelessness and cut $17.6 million from the fire department. DEI has been a greater priority for her and her three female fire chiefs than preventing and responding to fires. The openly-stated philosophy motivating her priorities were that there were too many white male firefighters, and great efforts were made to force them out and not rehire any more of them (even though firefighters normally need the kind of upper body strength few females possess). In Pacific Palisades where the fire first broke out there is a reservoir capable of holding

117 million gallons of water. The LA Times first reported it was empty for repairs, but it has been empty since 2009.  The generously paid water chief, ($750,000 p.a.) Janisse Quinones knew months before the fires that the reservoir was empty. She had to know as well that many of the fire hydrants were missing or empty. No timely effort was made to seek help from Canada or elsewhere to bring in planes capable of scooping water from the Pacific where the governor had sent California’s rainfall after he destroyed dams to save a smelt fish.

Billions of dollars in loss, much of it uninsured. That is because the state imposed price controls on insurance premiums and insurers could not make a profit on the mandated state maximums so they cancelled the insurance. (The same dopes who elected the people who made this lamebrained decision doubtless will paint the insurance companies, not the feckless legislators, as blameworthy for their substantial losses. The only advantage of a failed public education system is a plethora of really stupid voters.)

Most of these failures were points made by the president-elect years ago, who had experience as a builder working in California, all of which Governor Newsom ignored because play-acting at governance with a good hairdo seems to work well enough for Californians

Given the giant web of bureaucracies regulating the construction of housing in California, it will be a long time, if ever, before the burned-out areas will be able to be reconstructed. And when and if they are, those homeowners will be hit with massive taxes (taxes which will continue to be allocated for everything but essential services, if history is a guide.)

What another AMAZING “coincidence” California had just passed new tax laws, if your home burns down and you don’t rebuild within 2 years (impossible in California) you lose your tax basis. Your property taxes SKYROCKET to the new values of the property “Think about a home that was purchased many years ago for $5 million. Let’s say they were paying $65,000 a year in property taxes. Property goes up a lot over time, especially in these areas. Maybe the value today is $30 million. They go to rebuild it. If it was not, if they couldn’t transfer the tax basis, you’re looking at like $400,000 a year that they would have to pay” “In 2020, California voters approved a bill that basically said that if your house burns down in a fire, you can transfer the tax basis of that property to something that you buy or something that you build. But you only have two years to do it.” So some of the most expensive homes and properties the entire world now will get reassessed to pay maximum property tax values. 

Despite shelling out $24 billion on “homelessness’’ (likely to friendly leftist NGOs for salaries and political operations) homelessness has increased under Newsom by 40%.) Michael Shellenberger has a fine explanation of how the Left’s absurd hatred of Western civilization and human progress has led to this point. (Read it all for the best understanding.) Among the reasons for their failures is this:

…they are beholden to affluent, radical Left environmentalist and social justice donors who live in places like Marin County and Hollywood. These are the same people who bankroll radical Left groups like the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council, who have successfully blocked desalination and water storage plants, the proper clearing of flammable debris in forests, and effective management of landscapes around housing development, for over 45 years. Before that, the same groups and financial interests halted the expansion of nuclear power, which is the perfect energy source for desalination. [snip] For decades, Hollywood cranked out movies and TV depicting the exhaustion of natural resources and climate as causing the apocalypse. Yesterday, some reporters and scientists blamed climate change for the lack of rain in LA. That’s ridiculous. There’s no trend in annual rainfall from 1877 to 2024. We have wet years and dry years. Destroying civilization turned out to be expensive, not cheap. Californians pay the highest taxes for the most expensive gasoline, electricity, and water in the nation. [snip] Both ancient wisdom and modern psychology teach us that one can understand a person’s motivation by the consequences of their actions. California’s Democrats, progressives, and politicians lied when they said their highest priority was protecting the people of California. They lied when they said they cared about social justice. And they lied when they said they cared about protecting the environment. Instead, what they cared about was destroying the civilization they had long ago decided was evil. All civilizations require a story. The story that built Los Angeles and California was one of human progress. The story that destroyed it was of human sin. For decades, progressives, Democrats, and the news and entertainment media preached that civilization was evil and doomed. Slavery, indigenous genocide, and climate change were proof. And now, as the city of angels smolders, it’s clear that progressives reaped what they sowed.

In the meantime, fires still smolder, many suspected to have been caused by arsonists, and gangs of looters prowl areas where homeowners have evacuated. Newsom finally called in the National Guard to better control against it, but it’s about a week late.

In a better world the state could be put into receivership and its assets properly managed, absent that, many agencies and offices in the state are ripe for a thorough accounting and housecleaning.