Cutting firefighting budgets in a time of climate change. Brilliant.
by David Atkins
The forest around Yosemite has been going up in flames for over a week, and the fire is still only 20% contained after burning through 150,000 acres.
But the tinderbox forest isn’t the only thing that has gone up in smoke. The state and federal firefighting budget has as well, due in part to the sequestration budget cuts. The L.A. Times editorial board had some choice words about that:
Sequestration is bad policy for many reasons, but if lawmakers are foolish enough to engage in it, they should at least recognize that firefighting is a basic public safety service that should be exempt. Since 1960, there have been only six years during which wildfires burned more than 8 million acres, and all of those occurred since 2004, according to the National Interagency Fire Center…
States and municipalities also must change some of their policies, particularly those that have allowed too much construction abutting wild lands. The agencies that allow this dangerous sprawl aren’t generally the ones that pay for it. When fire breaks out on open land, it’s usually the federal government’s responsibility to fight the blaze in order to protect the homes, and to provide disaster aid afterward. Given the predictions of longer, more disastrous fire seasons to come, that’s an unsustainable equation.
All but the most ardent libertarians agree that firefighting must be part of the greater social compact that our taxes pay for. Those in the reality-based community also know that forest fires will become increasingly dangerous and more frequent so long as the planet continues to suffer warming due to CO2 emissions.
Cutting firefighting budgets in this context is political malpractice on a grand scale.
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