President Trump spoke out on the overregulation via environmental groups that leave underbrush and trees untouched creating kindling ripe for forest fires. The leftists have been having a field day with their jokes about President Trump grabbing a rake to move the underbrush. Not funny. This is a serious problem and has caused the deaths of dozens of people so you would think the environmentalists would be in favor of Governor Jerry Brown’s new proposal:
“Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing broad new changes to California’s logging rules that would allow landowners to cut larger trees and build temporary roads without obtaining a permit as a way to thin more forests across the state.”
ENVIRONMENTALISTS AREN’T HAPPY WITH THE PROPOSAL:
“Under Brown’s proposal, private landowners would be able to cut trees up to 36 inches in diameter…up from the current 26 inches…on property 300 acres or less without getting a timber harvest permit from the state, as long as their purpose was to thin forests to reduce fire risk. They also would be able to build roads of up to 600 feet long without getting a permit, as long as they repaired and replanted them.”
Brown and others scoffed at the president’s claim that poor forest management was to blame:
“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.”
It appears as though Brown has come over to the president’s camp with the new proposal Perhaps he’s learned his lesson after vetoing a bipartisan 2016 Wildfire Management Bill.
It’s time to put aside the differences and get to work helping the people. President Trump knows that and is pragmatically moving forward.
Politics takes no timeout amidst the flame and smoke, and human policy bears part of the blame for this years’ tragic toll of life and loss of property.
When deadly fires were burning last August, Mike Marcucci, the assistant chief of CAL FIRE, California’s main firefighting agency, noted in an interview with the CBS affiliate in San Francisco that, “It’s a daunting task that we’re working with some of our cooperators (i.e. federal and local authorities) to make sure we can get some of those trees out of the way to not add to some of the fuel.” CAL FIRE experts expanded on the problem by blaming decades of policy that discouraged controlled burns to reduce the fuel load in the now-burning forests in the north and hillsides in the south, creating tinderbox conditions.
