Maui on fire

A month ago, deadly fires tragically enveloped the historic town of Lahaina in Maui with over 100 people and counting dying. Predictably, the immediate fingers pointed at climate change, including the Democratic Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono, in a setup question by pretend journalist Jake Tapper, along with a bizarre political jab, saying some states don't allow you to say the words climate change. As it turns out, it was the response to climate change alarmism that was the leading cause, here. The Wall Street Journal reported with key segments highlighted by Michael Shellenberger, that the utility company in Hawaii only spent a quarter of a million dollars on wildfire mitigation between 2019 and 2022, far under what is needed to combat the aging infrastructure and invasive dry grasses in the area. What did they divert the resources to? Green energy! The utility regulators were focused on shifting electricity generation toward renewables due to political pressures. This, of course, costs a considerable amount of resources and this was very likely at the expense of wildfire mitigation. Also, this measure to mitigate climate change will do essentially nothing to combat climate change while wildfire mitigation probably would have saved a town and many lives. California did the same thing and giant chunks of the state were barbecued because of it. Given senator Hirono's comments and that Hawaii never seemed to learn from California's moronic strategy, I doubt this fire will teach the correct lessons to the politicians in charge. 

And just to preempt the argument, yes, the claim is that higher winds would worsen fires. But it's not like Hawaii was exactly exempt from high winds prior to 2023. They would have to argue that winds have increased in severity and frequency by an appreciable amount. As it turns out, the hurricane likely had little to do with the wildfires.

Hang on. The alarm over climate change caused the government to regulate the electric company to divert resources away from wildfire mitigation toward climate change mitigation. Holy shit. As it turns out, climate change did cause the Maui fires!!