California’s Political Fires - WSJ

California’s Political Fires - WSJ:
"“The fires are burning in California. They’ll be burning in France, burning all around the world,” fire-and-brimstone Governor Jerry Brown proclaimed recently in Paris.
The world is “on the road to hell.”
...Loath to let a natural disaster go to political waste, the California Air Resources Board used the fires to promote a new climate-change “scoping plan” aimed at doubling the rate at which it cuts carbon emissions.
The irony is that the emissions from wildfires could negate all of the state’s anticarbon policies.
A 2007 study in the journal Carbon Balance and Management found that California’s wildfires in 2003, which burned more than 750,000 acres, produced the monthly carbon equivalent of about half of the state’s fossil-fuel burning sources.
Ditto the state’s September 2006 wildfires.
On average the state’s annual emissions from wildfires equal about 6% of those from fossil fuels.
...In other words, California’s climate acts of penance will likely be overwhelmed by this year’s fires. They also won’t reduce global emissions or prevent a single fire.
In 2011 Democrats imposed a “fire prevention” fee on rural homeowners, but the money instead went to backfill the budget..."
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