Welcome to another week of The Runback. Have you been enjoying The Duckpin? Do you have comments or suggestions? Do you want to write for us? Let me know at theduckpin@gmail.com. And please be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Thanks in advance.
Episode #2 is Here
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News and Politics
That's Not What a Surplus Is For: Peter Franchot's Handout Gambit Reeks of Politics.
About That Time I Got Sued by a U.S. Senate Candidate....: How I defended free speech from a failed candidate.
Culture
Stop The Insanity: Your Gender Reveal Ideas are Not Interesting or Amusing.
Sports
Your 2020 NFL Previews: Click here for the AFC and Click here for the NFC and the Super Bowl predictions.
The Universal Title's Lost Summer: The Blue Brand's Belt has not meant much for a long time.
Herold wins 2nd Greater Baltimore Mini-Golf Tour Event of 2020: Ties Kaminski with most wins in 2020 season.
The Monday Thought
The wildfires in the western United States haven’t gotten nearly as much attention as they deserve. There are a few reasons for that. One is the fact that wildfires tend to be long-duration events that get forgotten about by the public and by the media, unlike something like a hurricane. The second is the fact that wildfires tend to disproportionately impact lower population density areas (Example: compare the media coverage for Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans, vis-a-vis Hurricane Laura which hit the rural, poor, predominately minority area of southwest Lousiana. That was only two weeks ago).
There has been a lot of conjecture that the wildfires are caused by anthropomorphic climate change. All you have to do is look at a simple Google search to see that so much blame is being placed on climate change. Here’s what the leader of the “party of science” has to say.
The ostensibly Catholic Nancy Pelosi’s heretical comments aside, as with most things the truth is a little more complicated.
There’s no doubt that climate change impacts everything that goes on around us. How much that climate change is influenced by us vis-a-vis cyclical climate changes that have occurred dozens of time in the Earth’s history is a point that can be debated. But what can’t be debated is this.
Wildfires are a policy failure.
Wildfires are not anything new, nor are they something that has only existed in modern times. They’ve happened for thousands of years, often triggered by lightning strikes in a dry forest. However, somewhere along the way, humans decided that it should be government policy to never allow forest fires to happen.
Former California legislator Chuck DeVore wrote about this very issue last February for Forbes:
This is California’s big secret: it’s not climate change that’s burning up the forests, killing people, and destroying hundreds of homes; it’s decades of environmental mismanagement that has created a tinderbox of unharvested timber, dead trees, and thick underbrush.
This dangerous situation attracted attention from President Donald Trump who, during the height of California’s wildfires last year insisted that “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor."
The irony is that forest management is so bad on public lands that a new report, ordered by the California legislature in 2010, shows that the portion of California's National Forests protected from timber harvesting is now a net contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fires and trees killed by insects and disease.
So yes wildfires are caused by policy, in this case forestry management, more so than any environmental concerns.
I highlight this issue to make two distinct points:
Policy is Governing: The sexy part of change doesn’t happen during campaigns, it doesn’t happen during the 1-minute speech in Congress, and it doesn’t happen on social media. It happens when policymakers sit down and do the work of writing policy. Whether it’s writing complex legislation or whether it’s writing Executive Branch policy, the decisions made in those rooms are what sets forth how the government runs and how government changes. As well know whoever influences that policy, whether they are a legislator, an executive, a lobbyist, or a friend, is driven by those who have a say in it. And we also know that policy creates longterm consequences, sometimes beneficial but often negative, for the public.
Soundbites are Easy, Governing is Hard: It’s very easy to blame climate change for wildfires, hurricanes, snowstorms, and whatever else you can think of. It’s easy for Nancy Pelosi to talk about “Mother Earth” being angry. But as Mencken said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Forestry policy has more to do with forest fires than climate change. Climate change didn’t cause a gender reveal party gone wrong. It’s not causing trees to spontaneously combust. And it’s not causing all the fuel on the ground of the forests that allow fires to burn so fast and spread so quickly. That’s a policy failure. The emphasis on soundbites instead of governing is how both major political parties and by extension our country finds itself in the position that it has.