Lomborg: Sorry, solar panels won’t stop California’s fires

Bjorn Lomborg wrote a fantastic piece in the NY Post and makes the point that even though he firmly believes climate change is happening, California's lack of forest management has created this emergency. Not climate change.

Bjorn is a frequent guest on the John & Ken show and President of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book is “False Alarm: How Climate-Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

Here is a little taste of Bjorn's NY Post piece:

When we keep suppressing fire, we ask for bigger and more terrible ­future fires. And we know how to fix this. We simply have to make many more prescribed burns that eliminate the built-up fuel. This is doable and smart. It would help reduce fire risks in just a few years. Unfortunately, it is also unpopular, because of ­increased smoke and risks from uncontrolled fires.
One prominent study published in Nature Sustainability this year estimated that California will have to burn about 20 percent of its area to get rid of all the excess fuel. But owing to popular opposition, legal challenges and regulatory limits, California manages prescribed burns for less than one-thousandth of that.
Instead of focusing on more prescribed burns, Newsom focuses on climate change as the overarching source of his state’s fires. He suggests that the answer is to speed up California’s transition to 100 percent renewable energy sources.
But any realistic climate solution will achieve next to nothing. A Californian change of policy will have virtually no impact on global climates. But even if the ­entire United States were to cut all its emissions tomorrow and for the rest of the century — an ­incredibly fanciful and enormously expensive assumption — temperatures would still climb, just 0.3°F less.
Fire would still get worse, only slightly less.

Listen to John & Ken talk to Bjorn Lomborg (calling in from Sweden) to give us the real reasons why were are seeing such horrific fires with many more yet to come.


Sponsored Content

Sponsored Content