Hacker News Reader

Excellent post, thank you.

It does seem to me that blaming the whole situation on climate change is an exaggeration. However, it is a politically savvy move from Newsom et al. as west coast states are solid blue. They are pandering to their audience. It also happens on the right with different issues.

View on HN

I agree, this is something politicians on all sides try to do, and I am not trying to single out the left for it more generally. I am just especially frustrated in this instance, because this issue directly affects me, my friends, and family. Our governor in Washington state, Jay Inslee, blamed climate change for wildfires in a round of press conferences back in the 2018 season as well, and he's doing the same thing now. His own Department of Natural Resources has been consistently asking for more investment in prevention before 2018, between 2018 and 2020, and still today in 2020. And yet there has been little to no movement from Inslee on the matter, so I feel he is lying to us. However, due to how polarized politics are these days, most constituents are giving Inslee a pass and blindly accepting his claims without examining the facts or surveying a diverse set of expert opinions.

I think that environmentalists want prescribed burns, right-wingers want to just cut all the forests down, and the compromise position is to do neither and then call the fires an act of God.

Forest management is helpful, but the task is unsurmountingly vast and yet compared to climate change, it’s dwarfed. But we have to tackle the big one because it has so many other effects that are catastrophic. Forest management is basically lost in the noise with climate change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com