The Daily Signal - How to Get California's Wildfires Under Control

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

The wildfires raging in California have killed at least 24 in less than a month. How well has the state responded to the wildfires, including steps to prevent them? What is the perspective of Californians on how well the state has dealt with the threat? Is something not being done to get this season's fires under control? John Cox, head of the nonpartisan organization CHANGE-CA, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss. We also cover these stories: Fully 65% of American voters say they are concerned about “law and order.”  President Trump signs an executive order aiming to lower the cost of prescription drugs.  Law enforcement offers a $100,000 reward as police search for a gunman who shot two Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, September 15th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Deltudis. While thefires in California are out of control, what can be done to get them contained? John Cox, head of the nonpartisan organization, ChangeC. A. joins me on the Daily Signal podcast to discuss. Don't forget. If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple

podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now, onto our top news. 65% of American voters are concerned about law and order. According to a poll from Mahmuth University, nearly two-thirds of Americans say that maintaining law and order is a major problem in the country right now. Another 25% say it is a minor problem, and 8% say it is not a problem. Additionally, according to monmouth.edu, Republicans and independents who lean towards the Republican Party, 77%, are the most likely to say that a lack of law and order is a major problem. Only 46% of white non-Republicans agree. However, non-Republicans who are black, 60% or of another race or ethnicity, are more likely than white non-Republicans to feel this way. President Trump has signed an executive order that aims to lower the cost of prescription drugs.

The president tweeted Sunday, just signed a new executive order to lower drug prices. My most favored nation order will ensure that our country's gets the same low price, big pharma gives to other countries. The days of global freewriting at America's expense are over. The executive order is designed to cut the cost of drugs down to the most favored nation price, meaning the lowest price paid by other developed nations. The price cuts do apply, though, only to those on Medicare. The signed order begins with the words, Americans pay more per capita for prescription drugs than residents of any other developed country in the world. It is unacceptable that Americans pay more for the exact same drugs, often made in the exact same places. The order has received criticism from those who say

that price controls will stunt innovation within the medical community. Michelle McMurray Heath, CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, said in a statement, With scientists and researchers at America's biopharmaceutical companies working around the clock to fight a deadly pandemic, it is simply dumbfounding that the Trump administration would move forward with its threat to import foreign price controls and the inevitable delays to innovation that will follow. Law enforcement is offering a $100,000 reward as police search for a gunman who shot two Los Angeles County Sheriff Deputies on Sunday. The deputies are expected to recover. after undergoing surgery with multiple gunshot wounds after the gunmen approached their patrol car outside a Compton train station and struck them repeatedly with gunfire. NBC Los Angeles reported. Riots erupted in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on Sunday evening and into Monday morning.

Hours after a police officer shot and killed Ricardo Munas, a 27-year-old black man who police day charged the officer with a knife. Police arrived at Muna's home around 4 p.m. Sunday in response to a call about a domestic dispute. Video from the police officer's body camera shows Munoz running out of his home and chasing the officer down the street with a knife before being shot. Muna's had a history of violence and was accused of stabbing four people, including a 16-year-old, just last year. In response to Muna's death, about 100 people gathered at the Lancaster Bureau Police early. Monday morning. Rioters damaged a police vehicle and through bricks at the building, breaking or damaging windows. They also threw bricks, glass, rocks, and gallon jugs of liquid at police officers. After multiple warnings, police deployed tear gas to break up the violence. Almost 400,000

Michiganers have signed onto an initiative to remove Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer's so-called virus powers. Once the initiative receives 500,000 signatures, it would go to the Republican Majority Michigan Legislature, which is expected to repeal the emergency powers of Governor Act, enacted in 1945, and used only a few times before, according to a report from the Mackinac Center. Repealing the law would deny Whitmer the farm-reaching power she has had to shut her businesses and schools and mandate social distancing, masks, and the size of gatherings. America's Ambassador to China, Terry Brandstad, is retiring. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made the announcement Monday, over the United, over the United States.

Twitter writing, I thank Ambassador Terry Brandstad for his more than three years of service to the American people as U.S. ambassador to the People's Republic of China. Brandstad will depart Beijing in early October, the U.S. Embassy and Consulate to China wrote on its website, adding the ambassador confirmed his decision to President Trump by phone last week. The ambassador has not said why he is retiring, but said in a prepared statement, I am proudest of our work in getting the phase one trade deal and delivering tangible results for our communities back home, our goal remains meaningful, measurable results for American families. We have made significant progress and we will not stop pressing for more. Now stay tuned for my conversation with John Cox on the

ongoing wildfires in California and what can be done to get them contained. Do you have an interest in public policy? Do you want to hear some of the biggest names in American people? politics speak. Every day, the Heritage Foundation host webinars called Heritage Events Live. Webinar topics range from ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic to the CARES Act and the economy. These webinars are free and open to the public. To find the latest webinars and register, visit heritage.org slash events. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by John Cox, head of the nonpartisan organization ChangeCA. John, it's great to have you with us on the Daily Signal podcast. Great to be with you, Rachel. Well, as everyone knows, or I'm sure most people do,

wildfires have been raging in the state of California and have killed at least 24 people in less than a month. John, can you start off by giving us a little bit of a glimpse into what's been happening in California? Yeah, it's nothing short of disaster throughout the entire state. And it's not just the fact that the fires are burning and killing people, which is horrendous in and of itself. It's also costing just incredible amounts of time and money as well as destroying the environment. The air is virtually unbreatable in most parts of Northern California. And that in itself is contributing to more problems in the atmosphere across the entire country. I just read today that the Midwest is now is having the smoke visit it.

And it's just going to be moving all across the world. So this is really a bad situation. And frankly, it doesn't have to be that way, Rachel. And I hope we'll talk about the solutions that really have been building. You know, the problem has been building up for 30 years or more. And there are solutions, but a lot of the political leadership is just not interested in doing what's necessary to counter this awful situation. Yeah, we'll definitely get to that. I want to ask, though, first, what is your perspective on how the state of California has handled the wildfires?

including what they've done. You mentioned this has been going on. There's been issues for the past 30 years. What is your perspective on how it's been handled? Well, first of all, we have to take our hats off and we have to just thank God for the wonderful work of our firefighters. I mean, the idea that they're just working in such horrendous conditions, not only the fires, but also the tremendous heat and the winds. And really, it's an inferno. And we just need to thank our our firefighters and our first responders. You know, again, it's, and I hope we get into the solutions here because the politicians are all quick to blame worldwide phenomena like the climate change situation.

And really and truly, this is a homegrown problem that has built up over, you know, several decades. And, you know, clearly humanity hasn't helped in some respect because we keep building further and further into the forest. So there's that urban wildlife interface that we hear a lot about. But if we really were looking at feasible solutions and better management, I think that this would not be anywhere near the problem. It's become.

And frankly, the people of California deserve to have a fix, a solution to this. And that's one of the things that I've been arguing. I did in my run for governor in 2018. And I'm doing it again with this non-partisan. as an organization because it's really hurting our quality of life here. Well, you have talked about several ideas that you have on how to get these wildfires under control. What do you think John can be done? Well, first of all, the problem is built up, Rachel, over the years, because a lot of well-meaning legislation, I suppose. I mean, in the

Sierra Club or the National Resource Defense Council, a lot of environmental lobbying groups have raised prodigious amounts of money. And, and, and, and, and, and, based upon the idea that we need to make sure that we don't touch our forests and we protect wildlife in the forest. And listen, I'm all for wildlife. I'm all for protecting our green, wonderful world. But we have to balance these things out. I mean, the Native Americans have dealt with fire risk for centuries, essentially. And it's no less of an issue today than it ever has been. And vibrant, healthy forests are those forests which are basically managed in a way that allows them to grow and allows the control of fire risk, which has obviously been here for generations and centuries. So that's the part that's really been ignored in this whole process.

And I know it's this subject of this political polarization that we're fine in the country right now. But people's lives are at stake here. The air is relatively unbreathable, and we are spending prodigious amounts of money fighting these fires, and we really should be talking about those solutions of forest management that really have been ignored or have been put to the sidelines because of these lobbying efforts by a lot of these groups. I would point out, Rachel, that as recently as the late 70s, California had a very vibrant lumber industry. We had something like 110 very active sawmill operations, mostly in the northern part of the state, but frankly all around the state.

And these lumber operations were dependent upon keeping the forests healthy. So they did control burns. They built fire breaks. They cut trees, of course, but they also replanted trees. It's a renewable resource and nobody has an interest in having more and healthier forests than somebody whose very livelihood depends on being able to grow trees and harvest them. So, you know, this is something that's, you know, been, as I said, going on for for decades and centuries. But in the last 30, 40 years, the lumber industry has been decimated, that we've gone from 110 sawmills, I think, to down to a single digits, like around five or six today.

And the result has been that the forests have not been touched, which some people may look as a public good. But the trouble is that there's been beetle infestations and some amount of drought that's happened. That's always happened in California. And a lot of these trees have died, and they're just left to sit there and fall and dot the landscape. And of course, what they are is tender for these incredible infernos that get started. They may start with human means, or they may start because of lightning, but it doesn't matter. The tender just goes up in flames and, quickly becomes an inferno.

And then, you know, as you might know, Rachel, these fires create a lot of wind because wind is the product generally of differences in temperatures. And so these fires get so hot and cause even more wind, which feeds the flames even more and makes it travel so that these small fires ultimately turn into raging infernoes that are just almost impossible to stop and cover just literally millions of acres. And that's, you know, one of the reasons why I'm talking about solutions such as more aviation equipment and more firefighters. Well, one idea, John, you have mentioned, is the creation of an updated state Air Force Corps, including a large fleet of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopter, which would be dedicated to rapid

response and containment of these wildfires. Can you tell us a little bit about how this would work? Well, I have visited the fires. I was there during the campaign and saw the destruction up in Northern California near Redding and Chico and Yuba City and a lot of the areas, Oroville, that are now in the news. But these places, a lot of these places burned in 2017 and 2018 as well. And I talked to the firefighters. And they told me that they're flying Vietnam-era helicopters that have been, you know, recycled and repurchased. but these are 40-year-old pieces of equipment that just don't have the power that we would expect and need, frankly. And there's just limited use available for these. And one of the things that we've been doing in the state, Rachel, is we've been spending an ordinate amount of money on a train going into the Central Valley that is way over budget, way behind schedule, and frankly has very much.

very few prospects for much in the way of ridership. And the politicians have had no problem, Jerry Brown and now Gavin Newsom have no problem spending literally hundreds of millions and even billions on this train. And they've ignored and not funded the purchase of equipment. So I've called for ending that train and deploying those resources to buy modern, effective, good equipment. We should have an all overwhelming resource of aviation equipment, first of all, that would be able to be put to bear.

You know, one of the things in the military that you've heard about with, you know, the issues in Iraq and other things like that were this idea of applying overwhelming force early on. it you know in the in the in the in the fog of war it demoralizes the opponent etc you know there's there's there's certain benefits for that in the context of fighting forest fires it's especially important to have a quick acting overwhelming force and why because you need to do that to get these fires put out or controlled before they turn into raging infernoes because once they get going once they turn into these infernoes. As I explain, they create their own heat and fire and wind. And the wind

causes them to get even hotter and more dangerous and causes them to travel further. So you've got even more of a problem with the breath of these fires. So the ability to go in very quickly and you know with overwhelming force. And that is best done with aviation. Our firefighters are absolutely necessary on the ground. But we really have got to have this overwhelming air force that would be able to go in. And that ounce of prevention, Rachel, would be worth more than a pound of cure from the firefighters and the risk to human life that that entails. Well, thank you for sharing that. I'm curious. I wanted to ask, what is Californians' perspective on how well their state has responded to the threat of these wildfires? Well, it's interesting.

You know, the media here is all about repeating what some of the politicians like the governor have said that, gee, this is just climate change and we haven't addressed climate change and therefore, you know, just expect this stuff. Well, you know, Rachel, I'm a businessman. I've been in business for 40 years, started with nothing and built a business. But the way I built it was I solved problems. I never had the luxury of being able to just say, oh, gee, I'm going to blame some other forest. that is frankly not necessarily curable and then just let the problem continue to fester. I've had to solve the problems in order to stay in business.

And I think that's the problem here in California. You have a lot of politicians who sit there and they jawbone about the climate change debate, which we don't need to necessarily get into. But clearly, by the way, it's a worldwide problem and it's caused more, frankly, by India and China dumping tons of particulate pollution into the atmosphere from coal energy plants than it is that anything's California has done.

California has done quite a bit to counter climate change. But the real issue is that these politicians just pass it off on that and they don't really get to the nub of solutions coming up with ideas like controlled burns and clearing dead trees and building roads and building fire breaks. the Air Force and updating our equipment. Those are things that, you know, they kind of put on the back burner and they want people to just focus on climate change. You know, maybe that's because they have lobbying groups that want more solar and wind power and they want to, you know, make sure that people are energized, you know, are activated to get those kinds of things inputted. But,

you know, we really have to, you know, take a step back and say, what is going to solve this problem and tackle these fires. And that's one thing, change California is dedicated to, and that is to try to get some solutions to this problem. Well, on that note, John, you mentioned the whole discussion surrounding climate change,

and former President Obama had said that we have clear evidence that climate change is responsible for the wildfires. What do you think of that? I can't necessarily, I don't agree with that at all. Certainly,

the fires are in a have occurred when the weather is hot well you know it's always hot in August in California I mean I've lived here for a number of years my family's been here for 40 or 50 years and it always gets hot in July and August it also doesn't rain very much in July and August in California so that you know it may be worse now the earth has gone through a warming of source I won't deny that one I ought it's had that before, the 30s, if you remember, that we had the dust bowl and we had significant increase in temperatures. But, you know, that's not an excuse for these fires. These fires have been far worse because we don't have a viable lumber and timber industry that would take care

of the forest. And we also have not spent the resources ourselves as federal and state agencies to deal with the tender build up and do the controlled burns and do the fire breaks and do the roads into the forest so that our equipment can get back in there. There's a whole lot of things that have caused this problem that just get so out of hand and it is absolutely disingenuous to just sit there and pass it off as climate change that we can't do anything about. Well, lastly, John, I know President Trump is visiting the region today surveying what's happened as a result of these virus as they continue. What's your perspective on how the president

has responded to the wildfires? Well, the president has talked about forest management. And, you know, listen, he's got a lot of issues on his plate and he, you know, needs to, I think, address a lot of different things. But this is really a national problem, as I said, the smoke is going east and it's going to hit the Midwest and East Coast. And certainly it doesn't add to the air quality of the entire planet. So it needs to be dealt with. There's a lot of people in Washington, Oregon, California, and other areas that are dealing with this and are dying. So I certainly think it's within his province to do something. Frankly, he needs a lot of cooperation from the governors. And I wish he were getting that from the California governor as well as the governors of Washington and Oregon,

who just like the California governor, want to just blame climate change and not deal with the practical realities of getting actual, you know, the problem solved. You know, if I were the governor of this state, I would be talking every single day about buying better aviation equipment, about getting, you know, fire breaks and controlled burns and doing more to manage these for us. And I think that's what the president's been talking about. And that's what needs to get done. Well, John, thank you so much for joining us on the Daily Signal podcast and talking through what's been happening in California. We appreciate having you. Thank you, Rachel. Good to be with you. And that'll do it for today's episode.

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