President Donald Trump is right about his claims that California has a water problem, but it was environmental rules, not a lack of water, that were the major factor in the growth of the state's wildfires, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., said on Newsmax Thursday.
"We have a serious water problem of our own making," McClintock said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "I'm not sure that was a big factor in these fires, though. The big factor in these fires was all of the environmental policies that the left has imposed on California, which have made it impossible for us to maintain the land, so they don't burn as intensely."
Trump on Wednesday threatened to withhold federal disaster aid for Los Angeles unless the state changes its approach to water management. He also repeated claims that the state's fish conservation efforts in the northern part of the state, under Gov. Gavin Newsom, are responsible for fire hydrants running dry in urban areas.
But McClintock said that environmental laws have made permitting for land management practices "endlessly time-consuming and ultimately cost-prohibitive," and they must be repealed.
"Before the modern era, we lost about 4.5 million acres a year to catastrophic fire," the congressman said. "But then in the 20th century, we established land management agencies. They basically did a little gardening."
The techniques included auctioning off excess timber to logging companies, leasing public lands to ranchers to suppress brush growth through grazing, using controlled burns to remove undergrowth, cutting firebreaks to contain fires, and using herbicides to keep brush away from residential areas.
"We put out fires before they could explode out of control, and those fire losses in California dropped from an annual 4.5 million acres a year down to just a quarter-million," he said.
But "because of environmental leftists" like Newsom, "in 2020, our fire losses were back up to 4.5 million acres. That's not a new normal. That's the old normal coming back. That's the way nature gardens," McClintock added.
Meanwhile, the environmental laws won't change unless there is a change in California's leadership, he noted.
"If you look at the census data, the vast majority of this exodus from California is going to places like Nevada and Arizona," said McClintock. "I cannot think of a single act of God that could do so much damage to California as to turn it into a less desirable place for people to live and work than in the middle of the Nevada nuclear test range. But acts of government can do that much damage."
The congressman said he supports Trump's threats to withhold aid unless water management changes, and he also said he thinks no federal aid should pass through the hands of Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, or their agencies.
"They've proven themselves to be completely incompetent in managing public lands and completely incapable of making good decisions," he said. "I think the aid needs to be administered through federal agencies directly to the victims."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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