Steve Milloy
@JunkScience
Here's the smoking gun explanation for how greens and their policies bear blame for the Los Angeles fire disaster:
1. The @LATimes reports:
"The Santa Monica mountains, Malibu canyons and other wildland areas near coastal Los Angeles generally burn too frequently, said Alexandra Syphard, senior research ecologist at the nonprofit Conservation Biology Institute and adjunct professor at San Diego State University. That’s caused native evergreen chaparral shrubs, which take several years to mature and make new seeds, to be replaced by invasive annual grasses that die in the early summer and catch fire more easily, said Helen Holmlund, biology professor at Pepperdine University. “That promotes more frequent fires which, in turn, leads to more loss of chaparral shrubs and more invasive species,” she said."
https://latimes.com/environment/story/2025-01-13/could-brush-clearance-have-helped-slow-the-spread-of-the-palisades-fire2. Here's why the Santa Monica Mountains still burn "too frequently":
"During the late '50s and early to mid '60s, a number of development proposals for the Santa Monica Mountains alarmed the public, newly sensitized to environmental issues by cultural touchstones like Rachel Carson’s "Silent Spring." In an effort to reduce pollution and stop the private home use of smog causing trash incinerators, one city councilman proposed filling many of the ranges’ canyons with city landfills. These landfills would then be converted into golf courses with developments around them. Caltrans proposed major freeways that would run through Malibu Canyon. A nuclear power plant was also proposed for Malibu. The beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu were being transformed from egalitarian public playgrounds into private havens of the ultra-rich and the comfortably retired. According to Edmiston, a short film that documented the leveling of mountains to create the Beverly Glen neighborhood caused a sensation, as did an article in Frontier magazine claiming that the creation of Beverly Glen signaled the end of the Santa Monica Mountains. In different pockets of Los Angeles, public dissent began to brew, and the idea of protecting the mountains by turning them into a chain of public parks began to be floated. Across the political and sociological spectrum, the cast of “who” began to take shape, eventually numbering in the thousands."
https://x.com/JunkScience/status/18781926995113657283. Summary: The greens blocked development of the Santa Monica Mountains, allowing them to continue to burn frequently leading, in turn, to more brush that provided the fuel for the foreseeable events of fire and the Santa Ana winds.
8:50 AM · Jan 13, 2025
