Democrats’ climate distraction won’t stop Hawaii wildfires
Washington Examiner
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President Joe Biden can’t be bothered to disrupt his beach vacation to even comment on, let alone visit, the most deadly wildfires in over 100 years, but that didn’t stop other Democrats from blaming the carnage in Maui on climate change.
“Heartbreaking fires in Hawaii! Scientists are clear that climate chaos wreaking havoc on ecosystems everywhere is the new norm,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) posted. “We need to take action immediately or else it will get even worse.”
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“The wildfires raging across Hawaii are a devastating view of our planet as we fail to adequately address the climate crisis,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) added. And, of course, Hawaii’s own Mazie Hirono had to join in, “I think that we very much need to acknowledge that climate change is upon us.”
Problem is, climate change isn’t to blame for the fires that destroyed the town of Lahaina. Failure to adequately manage invasive species is. And by trying to exploit this tragedy to push their climate change agenda, Democrats are making it harder to get the policy changes needed to actually reduce the chances that a tragedy like this will happen again.
For decades, Hawaii was dominated by large plantations of sugar cane and pineapple. As global trade made those enterprises less profitable, land that had once been cleared for agriculture has now been overtaken by foreign species of grass that grow fast, suck up a lot of water, and are much more flammable than native species.
“Hawai’i’s fire problem is due to the vast areas of unmanaged, nonnative grasslands from decades of declining agriculture,” University of Hawaii at Manoa professor Clay Trauernicht said. “These savannas now cover about a million acres across the main Hawaiian Islands, mostly the legacy of land clearing for plantation agriculture and ranching in the late 1800s/early 1900s.”
A 2014 report found that the average area burned in Hawaii today was 400% higher than just 100 years ago, with more and more being burned every decade. After large brush fires destroyed many homes in 2018 and 2019, a Maui County report recommended an “aggressive plan to replace” flammable nonnative grass species, but it does not appear that recommendation was carried out.
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The Democrats’ continued focus on climate policy over proper land management is not just a threat to Hawaii, but to the mainland too. The U.S. Forest Service has a backlog of more than 80 million acres of land that is filled with dead and dying diseased trees that should have been harvested years ago. The Bureau of Land Management has another 50 million acres in need of upkeep.
For thousands of years Native Americans used fires to shape wildlife for their own purposes. Only after Europeans settled the West did “nature” become a sacred resource that had to be kept pristine. If humans don’t actively manage the vegetation that grows near our communities, nature eventually will. But it will be done in a much more fiery and destructive manner than if we had done it ourselves.