Climate experts hosted a media call Wednesday to discuss the tragedy of the devastating Maui fire—and how government’s negligence and obsession with the “climate change” hoax created a situation ripe for disaster.
The call featured Gregory Wrightstone of the CO2 Coalition, H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy , and Trump transition team member Steve Milloy of JunkScience. They discussed dishonest media, government negligence, climate change obsessions, and the Lahaina fire. Despite 50 years of failed predictions, climate alarmists are more blinded than ever.
The experts agreed that government accountability, starting with Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, is necessary. Milloy recommended a congressional investigation. “They’re [the government] taking all this money from us [taxpayers], supposedly for climate, and building wind turbines and solar panels and EVs. Meanwhile, in Lahaina, no one spent a nickel getting anybody ready for a foreseeable disaster. And that is just unforgivable.” Burnett chimed in to note that Maui has been warned about the serious risk of wildfires for a decade, but was totally unprepared.
Burnett also talked about the weaponization of media to support climate hysteria. He said, “Within hours, you have the media dancing on the still-smoldering corpses of the people of Lahaina, blaming climate change.” For them, it’s a “knee-jerk reaction,” he said. The same rhetoric was spouted about Hurricane Hillary, which just brought bad weather to California. The media coverage is always exaggerative and based on highly selective data or pure ideology.
Preventive measures like thinning forests are ignored, exacerbating the risk of fires, Burnett continued. “That is not climate change, that is poor management,” he insisted. If the monsoons are greater or less in India, if the Atlantic Ocean’s current is decreasing or increasing, the same cause is always given. “The media jumps on any weather event…and blames climate change for it, even if it is the opposite of what they claimed days, months, or years ago,” Burnett concluded. The media practices poor journalism, which gives government an excuse to increase its power.
Later, after I questioned them, the experts expanded on the topic of mismanagement as a cause for fires—and on various theories about the Lahaina fire’s origins. Milloy noted that there were several individuals arrested on Maui last year on arson charges, and that there is always the possibility of arson in such a case. “You can have arson, you can have negligence.” Arson might be only a rumor, but there was certainly government and electric company negligence involved in the Maui fire, he went on.
The Yosemite fires last year, Milloy said, were “started by a climate activist,” so it wouldn’t be unprecedented for eco-terrorists to start a huge fire. “But whether it’s arson, or a power line, or a lightning strike, you know, the government knew the conditions were ripe for a wildfire, for a disastrous one,” Milloy emphasized. “Lahaina was just a sitting duck for something to get out of control, and the ball was just dropped the whole time.”
Burnett also gave his opinion. While we don’t know the Maui fire’s origins, we do know that, earlier in 2023, Hawaii’s Democrat Gov. Green announced “$100 million additional—additional—dollars to fight climate change,” Burnett explained. “Not one of those dollars went to clear brush and native grasses, not one of those dollars went to make sure that fire hydrants were filled with water, to ensure that the sirens would be set off in an emergency. Any one of those single actions, which would have cost a fraction of that $100 million, would have done more to save lives than all the spending that he did, which saved no lives.”
Democrats fund expensive “climate change” programs instead of using the money where it’s really needed, Burnett explained; and, in this case, unfortunately, Lahaina residents paid the price. Of course media doesn’t report on it honestly, because of the “weaponization of media” to prop up the climate narrative.
Milloy then added a very interesting detail that makes the government’s unpreparedness even more strange. “Hawaii Electric, the utility [company] out there, gave the Hawaiian government a $190 million plan last June to prevent wildfires, and the government just sat on it,” he said. “Meanwhile everyone, including Hawaii Electric, is spending all this money on windmills, and solar panels…all this ‘green’ stuff. No one is doing their basic job, everyone has been distracted by climate away from, you know, their fundamental duties.”
As Wrightstone explained, there are very simple methods of protecting against such a catastrophe as Maui experienced, particularly through “really inexpensive” fire brakes. “The government, they have blinders on, and the blinders are focused solely on climate change and curing a non-existent problem, rather than looking at the real possible dangers,” he went on, after I asked him if the government is deliberately negligent precisely because of their climate obsession and desire to play up the fake crisis.
Burnett agreed with Wrightstone and cited an old saying: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In this case, that means “they are so focused on climate change that even when—even when their own reports, their own official reports say wildfire is a high risk, they don’t focus on wildfire. Because, to them, wildfires aren’t wildfires, they’re climate fires.” Some of these people believe “if it weren’t for climate change, they’d never have wildfires,” Burnett concluded.
Milloy noted that my question about the government’s climate obsession and the reasons for its neglect gets to the “key and possibly darkest question of all–why is this stuff done? These are real dangers.” Why do governments persist in creating situations ripe for catastrophic fire, knowing the risk and knowing previous results?
“While wildfires have declined in burn acreage and frequency over the past hundred years, there is some uptick now, and the reason is pretty obvious,” he said. Green activists managed to put a stop to logging and other methods that help prevent disastrous fires, meaning that forests turned into “tinderboxes.” Governments “never admit fault…instead they just scream ‘climate!’” Milloy explained, and “media plays along with it.” But that doesn’t change the fact that bad policies are setting the stage for destructive fires. “Everyone now knows, around the world, these wildfires are being exacerbated by poor forest management, yet no one is doing anything about it. And you must ask why?” Milloy continued. “In Maui, I mean, this is really egregious.”
“How can you not have water in a fire hydrant?” he asked. “The whole thing is unbelievable.” And it does raise the question of the government’s motives in deliberately continuing policies that cost lives. Milloy later noted that massive “climate” spending will have no impact on saving the planet or humans.
Wrightstone added that the media reporting is often “completely severed from reality, completely severed from what the science, the facts, and the data tell us.” He said that fires globally have been declining for decades, but that fact isn’t published because it would undermine “climate fear.” Burnett agreed that “we have largely suppressed wildfires in forests,” but now there’s a decline in helpful practices like logging—a decline that started after Ronald Reagan—and an uptick in arsonists. Unfortunately, countries around the world are equally blinded by climate ideology, Burnett noted.
Yet Wrightstone said that, by multiple metrics, “Earth’s ecosystems are thriving and prospering and humanity’s benefitting.” The “climate facts tell us that we should celebrate additional warmth and more CO2.” In fact, carbon is absolutely essential for life on Earth, including both plants and humans, making climate alarmists’ “zero-carbon” goals questionable and even dangerous.
The focus for both businesses and government is all wrong, the experts agreed. Companies should focus on providing “reliable, affordable” energy, not figuring out woke ESG (environmental, social, governance) scores. “Hawaii Electric, in its ESG report for 2022, fretted [about] wildfires in the year 2100 from global warming,” Milloy said. Meanwhile, negligence from Hawaii Electric in upkeeping power lines and the surrounding land could have started the Lahaina fire. This is a sobering illustration of how destructive the “climate change” obsession can be.
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