Brehm: Climate change didn’t cause the Los Angeles wildfires. Government incompetence did.

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Four of some of the happiest years of my life were spent living in Southern California. Like the publisher of the Minnesota Star Tribune, I’m an alum of Claremont McKenna College, and I fell in love with Los Angeles when I was a student there in the early 2000s.

An odd affection, I suppose, for a conservative guy like me, but it’s a magnificent metropolitan area with stunning rolling hills, blue ocean, beautiful beaches and lots of action. And there really is no typical Angelino; the variety and diversity of people in that city is spectacular. It’s hard to beat life as a college kid anywhere — but doing it in La La Land was pretty terrific. And I still always like returning.

It breaks my heart to see the devastation the recent wildfires sweeping that area have wrought on a community that’s already been so badly beaten up these past few years with the out-of-control crime and population loss Los Angeles County has suffered from. The blazes have taken the lives of at least 25 people; have burned more than 36,000 acres, which is a greater geographical footprint than all of Miami, and have engulfed an estimated 12,000 homes and businesses, causing more than 200,000 residents to be displaced. It is a tragedy of truly historic proportions, and its impact will be felt by Californians and its politics for years to come. People there don’t deserve to have to live this way, and I suspect they may start to vote differently so they won’t.

It has been troubling to see aggressive members of the climate lobby, not apt to let any natural disaster go to waste by failing to label it a direct effect of rising global temperatures, quick to declare the Los Angeles fires purely a symptom of America’s love for fossil fuel. Drive an electric car, they demand, or more of this apocalyptic stuff is on the way. Ditch your straws, they bully, or a tornado, hurricane or fire is headed toward a neighborhood near you. Fear has too frequently been the tool of choice with much of that crew. I welcome substantive debate about climate change public policy, but the knee-jerk alarmism from the left, and the environmental hypocrisy of many of its supposedly greenest of leaders, is causing much of America to tune out the issue entirely.

Based on what we know today, it appears what made these recent Los Angeles fires so horrific and uncontrollable was not climate change and our inattention to it, but plain old progressive incompetence.

Wildfires are nothing new to the LA area, and I recall watching flames spread across the San Gabriel mountains with regularity from my CMC dorm room when I was there. Actually, Los Angeles County has experienced on average two major conflagrations per decade over the last century, owing to the Golden State’s wet/dry seasonal cycle (brush in the foothills thrives in winter rains and dries out during sunny summers) and the powerful Santa Ana winds. It’s a combustible area by Mother Nature’s design — and always has been.

Last week, the problem wasn’t just the fires, as serious as they were, but that Southern California found itself without the proper tools and leadership that capable municipalities should be able to deploy to contain them.

Californians are some of the most heavily taxed people in the country, so you’d expect them to be enjoying state-of-the-art public safety infrastructure, of which there is no more obvious symbol than a fire hydrant. Yet as brave LA firefighters initially tried to contain the Eaton and Palisades fires, they found that this critical tool of theirs was often without water and pressure. Why?

Astonishingly, even in the face of recent wildfire warnings, Los Angeles city officials allowed the 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir in Pacific Palisades to remain bone-dry for standard maintenance. Common sense would have guided a delay of that work. But that quality seems to be lacking in the City of Angels’ leadership.

The Los Angeles water system — with over 7,000 miles of pipes averaging over a half century in age — also just isn’t equipped to fight wildfires. But it sure as heck should be by now given the public safety threat these fires have posed to the area for decades. Yet, upgrading such a system is costly and, even though California state and local governments are flush with taxpayer cash, spending it on income transfers and global warming initiatives plays better with the state’s liberal political base, so the Democratic politicians that run California do. And in turn they have neglected less progressively sexy but more critical projects like substructure upgrades that certainly would have come in very handy to first responders there this week and last.

And thanks to the rampant crime that has plagued the LA area, there are missing hydrants all over the place because people have been stealing them to sell them as scrap metal. According to the Golden State Water Company, between January 2023 and May 2024, more than 300 fire hydrants were illegally lifted from LA County streets. Lawlessness is dangerous in so many ways.

The first Trump administration also had a prudent plan to let more water flow from the Sierra Nevada snowpack in the northern part of the state to the south and stored instead of flushing it out into the Pacific Ocean, as is the case today. But Sacramento Democrats unwisely surrendered to the environmental lobby, as they always do, and scuttled the sensible design, citing supposed hazards to the delta smelt, a tiny fish averaging in size of 2 inches and 10 grams. I’m all for protecting endangered species, but I do value human lives and homes over the well-being of minnows.

Of course, the ineptitude of Democratic LA Mayor Karen Bass is hard to exaggerate, and her role (or lack thereof) in responding to the fires added additional chaos instead of steadiness to an already muddled emergency. She had been briefed on the hazards that her city’s dry hillsides and record-high winds posed. Her response? Hop on a plane and travel halfway across the globe for the inauguration of the president of Ghana. And it was at her endorsement that Los Angeles last year cut its fire department funding by over $17 million and spent more on homelessness alone than that entire critical public safety division’s overall budget. What foolishness. As the publisher of the Los Angeles Times said while acknowledging his newspaper’s error in previously endorsing Bass for the job, “competence matters.” It sure does.

There is evidence to suggest that the climate is changing, and how we humans conduct ourselves certainly impacts it. I’m not denying that. But natural disasters plagued our planet long before the industrial revolution began. While a debate can be had that greenhouse gas emissions may be making them metamorphose, the severity of the Los Angeles’ wildfires was primarily due to unprepared and dysfunctional local and state California government. And given the state’s wildfires annually produce as much carbon as nearly 2 million cars (2025 will surely be far worse), climate activists should be as outraged by their failed containment as anyone else. Golden State leaders have been distracted for too long with woke virtue signaling instead of doing the hard work of substantive and adept governance. Voters in that declining state should demand they return to it.

Andy Brehm is a contributing columnist for the Minnesota Star Tribune. He’s a corporate lawyer and previously served as U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s press secretary.