What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires?
2020-01-15 · Guest: Myron Ebell (Competitive Enterprise Institute) · 52:12
Causes of Wildfires in Australia and California
Bob Zadek and Myron Ebell discuss the underlying causes of catastrophic wildfires in Australia and California, arguing that environmentalist policies banning prescribed burns and logging have created dangerous fuel loads. They explore the history of the climate change movement, the “greening” of the Earth due to increased CO2, and the perverse incentives created by government land management. Ebell advocates for a return to active forest management and private property rights to mitigate fire risks.
Topics: Wildfires, Forest Management, Climate Change, Environmental Policy, Australia, California, Logging, Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Endangered Species Act, Property Rights
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Myron Ebell: Director of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
Introduction and the History of the Climate Movement [00:18]
Bob Zadek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thank you so much for listening this winter Sunday morning, a morning of the playoff games as well to see who competes in the Super Bowl, and my beloved Niners are in the hunt. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning.
I’d like to start off with a bit of a riddle. See how many of you can answer this. What’s the opposite of Al Gore? Well, the answer to the question is this morning’s guest. This morning’s guest is Myron Ebell. Myron is the Director of Energy and Environment at one of my favorite free-market think tanks, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, aka CEI. He also chairs an organization called the Cooler Heads Coalition—neat name. And the Cooler Heads Coalition has representatives of lots of non-profit organizations, and they really are the contrary view to the alarmist attitude held by many, mostly on the left, that our planet is doomed, that climate change will do us in, and something must be done to save Earth.
Myron has studied environmentalism for many, many years at CEI, and he has been particularly active. He advises President Donald Trump on issues such as climate in general and the Paris Accords that Trump pulled out of—you may remember that as one of his initial acts when he took office. Myron is here to share his wisdom on a subject which is in the news every day, which is the wildfires—perhaps even that is a misnomer, we’ll learn that—the wildfires that are raging in Australia and the really interesting correlation, similarity if you will, between the wildfires in Australia and the wildfires that have ravaged California over the past couple of years. They have common sources, and the reason for these fires is not what you think. Myron, welcome to the show this morning.
Myron Ebell: Thanks for having me, Bob.
Bob Zadek: Now, Myron, you have been called in a New York Times article going back right after Trump was elected, you have been called a “climate criminal.” So, and you have been accused of destroying our future. Now, it’s kind of interesting. I want to assure our audience that you are not on the air this morning talking to us from some air-conditioned cell. You are not a climate criminal, as the group will learn, as our audience will learn. And the concept in the New York Times of destroying our future—that made my head explode. How could anybody destroy the future? It’s impossible intellectually, but congratulations for being accused of trying to do that, whatever that may mean.
So, welcome to the show this morning, Myron. You have been studying global warming—the bad science, the good science—and there is, needless to say, a very powerful, very well-funded, vociferous, active movement called protecting us against climate change. Where did that come from? Do we all of a sudden—have we lived for several thousand years not caring if Earth is destroyed, and all of a sudden, thank heaven, a movement has sprung up to save Earth from total destruction? So, give us a little insight, since you have studied it and since those who fear climate change are the other side. Where did that come from? Why are we even talking about this today?
Myron Ebell: Well, that’s a very big question, Bob. The global warming bandwagon really got going in the early 1980s, a long time ago. And it really started in Sweden and then Germany. I’m following what I’ve learned over the years, but particularly a book by an English author named Rupert Darwall, who wrote a book that is the best summary of the history a few years ago.
The Swedes had various problems. One is that they’re very highly taxed, but their social welfare system needs more and more revenue, so they’re always looking for new taxes. A tax on carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil, and natural gas was something that they were looking at in order to particularly move to nuclear power and also raise revenue. Now, why would that be an attractive tax for Sweden? Well, they’re heavily Lutheran, they have a social conscience, and so this is a tax on bad things, namely burning coal, oil, and natural gas. So that’s where it really got started back in the early ’80s. Germany was the next big step, and then in 1988, it hit the United States and it went global. We got the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is supposed to study the climate science, and then we got in 1992 President George H.W. Bush signed the Rio Earth Treaty, which is also called the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. So this has been going on a long time. It starts really in the ‘80s.
The Australia Wildfire Crisis and Land Clearing [05:18]
Bob Zadek: And what’s interesting about the climate change movement is that, like almost every other similar movement—war on this, war on that—it is really a war on freedom, free choice, personal decision-making, and the like. Because inherent in this morning’s topic—climate change or the war on global warming, if you will—what’s an important part of it is it involves the surrender of choice by businesses and by individuals, from the minuscule of what kind of light bulb you can use and how much water can come out of your showerhead—it goes from those minuscule, kind of almost humorous compromises of freedom to the big stuff on how we generate our power, how we build a power grid and the like.
Inherent is the typical from-the-left characteristic, and that is that choice must be removed from individuals and businesses because government is smarter. That a very few, the select minuscule group of people in “government” know more about everything than the hundreds of millions of people who occupy the planet. And this morning’s topic of the wildfires in Australia, California, and other parts of the US and Brazil and the world have that in common: the taking over of, in this case, land and forest management, removing it from individuals and from the owners of the land to government, with, in this case, horrific and disastrous consequences.
So, talk first, Myron, if you will, about what happened in Australia. What happened to cause the horrible fires that are still raging and spreading somewhat out of control in Australia? Where do you trace the source of that? Is it that we are burning too much coal and natural gas, or is the source of those fires something a bit deeper?
Myron Ebell: Well, the global warming folks were very quick to blame the catastrophe that’s going on in Australia on global warming. But in fact, there are two factors. One is that the kind of forests that they have in Australia, which are mainly eucalyptus, are very prone to fire when you get droughts. And the fires are very quick and very hot, and they’re very destructive. Now, Australia is a place that has droughts. It will have a number of years—these things come in cycles—it will have a number of years of average or above-average rainfall, and then it will have a period of two or three or four years of drought. We’re in the third or fourth year of drought in Australia. It’s been hot there. Australia is a hot place. And so, the first thing is that Australia is subject to periodic bushfires.
The second thing is that these bushfires are much worse now because the environmental movement in Australia has convinced the government—and it’s not just the left or what we would call the Democrats, it’s also the conservatives, or what in Australia is called the Liberal Party—they have convinced successive governments to stop and prohibit the policies that minimize and control these fires. And the main policy—and there are several others, but the main policy—is what’s called “land clearing,” which involves prescribed burns of in certain areas very strategically. And they’ll do these prescribed burns in the winter, that is in our summer, when it’s wet and cool, and they will burn areas so that a big fire can’t get going. If they get a drought the next summer and there’s a fire, it will stop because there will be essentially a big firebreak. And the environmental movement in Australia has basically banned that practice. And so, once the fires get going, they just go and go and go.
Bob Zadek: Why would they ban a practice that is clearly demonstrated to be effective and the perfect way, and inexpensive way, to take control of nature in a positive way? Although wildfires are created naturally—some man-made, but let’s assume for this conversation naturally—to take wildfires that start naturally and just control them to minimize their damage. Why would the environmental movement oppose that? They should support it. So what’s the theory behind it, albeit a flawed theory?
Myron Ebell: Well, the theory is that whatever human beings do to the environment is bad. And the environmental movement has basically sold that belief to urban people. Australia is heavily urbanized; they have most of the people—90% of the people, I think—live in about six or seven major cities. So it’s highly urbanized, and people who don’t have a whole lot of connection to nature are much more likely to believe what they’re told when you have a movement like the environmental movement that has a very large megaphone and just keeps repeating that, you know, human activity is bad and natural activity is good.
The Greening of the Earth and Fuel Buildup [10:30]
Myron Ebell: Bob, you’re well aware we have exactly the same thing going on in the West and in California, where the fuel buildup that’s caused by gross mismanagement of our public lands in particular—stopping timber production in our national forests, for example—that has led to exactly the same kind of environmental catastrophe. It’s going on every summer now in the Northwest and in California because the federal lands have huge fuel buildup. If you don’t cut the timber, it eventually will burn down, and that’s what’s happening. And so we’re getting one environmental catastrophe after the other in the West, and it’s the same mentality of the environmental movement in both countries.
Bob Zadek: And aren’t they—weren’t they complaining that if you start a fire, albeit a controlled fire which cannot spread, if you start a fire, you are doing the very thing that’s going to damage the Earth, and that is a fire creates as a byproduct, obviously, CO2, and you are spewing more CO2 into the air? So don’t they say, “No, it’s like burning a coal-fired power plant. You are putting CO2 in the air, and anything you do to put CO2 in the air, even if it’s for the right reason, that makes it per se an activity that should be discouraged”? Isn’t that kind of their approach?
Myron Ebell: Well, yes. There’s another side to that, which is higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere. We’re burning a lot of coal, oil, and natural gas, and very slowly the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone up from 270 parts per million in 1800 to 400 parts per million today. That’s about one part in 2,500 in the atmosphere is carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and so we should expect a little bit of warming, but the direct effect of higher CO2 levels is a greening of the Earth.
Plants require CO2 in order to photosynthesize, to turn sunlight into caloric energy—the stuff that we eat and that cattle eat and that deer eat. So, the greening of the Earth is absolutely indisputable. And of course, that means that the forests are growing more, our crops—every year we have higher crop yields in the grain belt. And of course, Australia has been greening up too. And so, of course, that has in fact led to—once you get a drought and you don’t have prescribed burns—then you’re going to have even bigger fires than you had a couple hundred years ago when there was less green stuff on the ground. So, it’s a complicated world. People like Al Gore deny that the Earth is greening up, but if you go to the NASA website, you can find satellite photography that shows absolutely that the Earth is greening up as a result of higher CO2 levels.
Mismanagement of the American West [13:40]
Bob Zadek: And when you read articles—in fact, every article on wildfires—you will find the verb “spread.” The fire is spreading. And what struck me, and the importance of my pointing that out, is that controlled burns are designed to prevent that from happening. Isn’t the whole strategy of a controlled burn to isolate a forest fire so it cannot spread?
I thought about—I watch a lot of those old submarine movies. And in submarines and in ships in general, every time crew members move from one part of a submarine or a ship to another, they close and seal the door behind them so if there is a leak, the leak doesn’t spread the inflow of water to another part of the boat. So they isolate the damage. And I also thought of when we used to have epidemics. What did we do? We quarantined the carrier of the disease. We quarantined. And it worked. And we kept people carrying the disease from spreading it—the very verb, “spread.” And is it—am I being too simplistic, or is it accurate to say that the purpose of a controlled burn is to prevent not a forest fire from happening, but to prevent its spreading?
Myron Ebell: That’s correct, Bob. Of course, controlled burns are an imperfect science. They’re not always controlled; sometimes they get out of control. But there are many tools to manage our forests and our grasslands and our scrubland. You have a lot of chaparral scrubland on the California coast. And prescribed burns are one of the tools. In the Northwest, the big forests of the Northwest—Northern California, Western Oregon, and a little bit of Washington state—the main thing to keep fires down is to actually have timber production, logging. A well-managed forest is not one that’s all grown up with brush and small trees; it’s one that has big trees and a lot of open ground. And those big trees that are not all packed in together but are spread out are much more resistant to big fires than the kind of forestry we have now. If you look at the Sierra Nevada, you’ll see millions of acres of dead trees that are just ready to go up in smoke and a very hot fire. And it’s because they’re too dense, and it’s not really forests, it’s just heavy brush. And these are very unhealthy, and they’re really the result of gross environmental mismanagement demanded by groups like the Sierra Club.
The Power of the Environmental Lobby [15:18]
Bob Zadek: The question I have is that maintaining a healthy forest is, in fact, or ought to be the goal of environmentalism. And I think it is the goal. If it’s the goal, and if it is so obvious that the policies that presently seem to dominate governmental decisions are anti-healthy forests, how did the scientists who know how to make and keep a forest healthy—how did their voices, since they have God on their side, they can point to healthy forests as the result—Myron, that’s a reference to the ’60s when you were growing up, “we have God on our side,” I think it was a folk song, I don’t remember who sang it—but getting back to environmentalism, how did good science not being able to prevail and getting drowned out by such terrible science?
Myron Ebell: Science has been on the retreat on environmental issues for a long time as a result of just the size and power and the wealth of the modern environmental movement. I mean, people still think of the environmental groups that came to life in the ’60s and ’70s as little grassroots groups, and there are quite a few and they tend to be better. But the big groups like the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund—these groups all have budgets in excess of $100 million a year, and some of them are approaching $200 million a year. Now, you can buy a lot of public relations and movement of public opinion when you have that kind of money.
And what they’ve done for years—and I mentioned this when we started—what they’ve done for years is foster the belief that nature is really good when it’s just left to itself. Everything works fine except when human beings become involved; it all goes haywire. And that has been the belief. Now, we still find parts of the world where forests are very healthy and beautiful and people love to go to them and they’re full of wildlife. The German forests, Switzerland, Austria—these are forests that are still heavily managed, although that’s changing somewhat. They’re locking up larger and larger pieces, so they’re maybe a couple of generations behind what’s gone on in this country. But you know, when people go to Germany and they see some of these forests, they come back and say how beautiful they are, why can’t we have forests like that? Well, it’s because they’re very heavily managed.
And I’m not against having some areas not be managed, you know, there is a place for a true wilderness that people don’t manage. But by and large, our national forests and our public lands were created to be managed, and it’s really unfortunate that a lot of them aren’t in private hands because they would be much better managed today if they were in private hands rather than being owned by the federal government.
Property Rights and the Australia Firefighter Case [17:40]
Bob Zadek: So in point of fact, the environmental movement is really bad for the environment. How strange is that? This is Bob Zadek. I’m speaking with Myron Ebell this morning. We are talking about forest fires, the similarity between the Australian wildfires that are raging right now and spreading, and the California wildfires which have already spread, and trying to drill down and trace why we are suffering from so many forest fires. Is government part of the problem, part of the solution? The answer is obvious and will be more obvious when we come back from a short 30-second break. Please stay tuned.
[Ad Break]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio. The show which is this morning and forever the show of ideas, never, ever the show of attitude. This morning we are talking with Myron Ebell. Myron handles environmental issues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He has studied the politics as well as the science of the environmental movement, and he is here to sort of give us the straight scoop on why many scientists, many of those people who study the science of environmentalism, why their voices and how their voices get drowned out by those who would use the environmental movement as simply political cover to move control of the economy from the individual to government.
Now, Myron, in California there are many similarities, remarkable similarities between California and Australia, both in terms of the natural similarities and forest management. So what should California learn from Australia or the reverse? What are the similarities? What are they both doing wrong? You have partially explained about Australia. What is California doing wrong so it is, as a governmental matter, the cause of the spreading of forest fires, not the solution?
Myron Ebell: California has—a lot of California has a climate that’s similar to a lot of southeastern Australia. And it’s a climate of, you know, kind of a Mediterranean climate that’s dry and that is subject to regular drought and to regular wildfires. So the question is, how can people live in that climate successfully? What’s happening now is everything that could be done wrong in California is being done wrong, even though a lot of people recognize what the problem is, which is you have two types of terrain. You have the chaparral along the coast where more and more people want to live, they want to live out in nature, but they don’t do the kind of preventive actions that are necessary to save their homes when there’s a wildfire. And there are going to be wildfires in the chaparral country, the brushland, regardless of what human beings do.
And what needs to be done is people need to be allowed to clear the land around their houses, keep it clear so that when a brush fire does come through, it won’t destroy their house. In Australia, the practice of protecting your own house if you’re a rural Australian has pretty much been prohibited by legislation. There’s a very famous story you can find on the internet where a rural firefighter went ahead against the law and he cleared the land around his house, and he was fined $50,000 Australian and had $50,000 court costs. And when the fire came, his house was the only one in the neighborhood that survived. So I think if we’re looking at just personal protection from these fires despite terrible government mismanagement, the first thing is people need to be allowed to keep the vegetative growth around their houses from getting too dense and subject to fire. So that would be the first thing I would say.
Bob Zadek: And also, what’s incident in your story about the firefighter in Australia is he was doing something on his own land for the purpose of protecting his home. That has to offend anybody who hears the story, that somebody on their own land, doing something that affects nobody other than the firefighter and his family—he’s doing something to protect his family, and the government responds to fine him $100,000 Australian as a result. That story alone, putting aside the fire component, the fact that somebody isn’t allowed to do something on their own home which doesn’t affect anybody—in fact, might protect other people, but it sure doesn’t hurt anybody else—and he gets fined just because he’s not in the governmental program.
Myron, that reminds me of a story I told on the show years ago. You may recall the case. There was a landowner who lived on a mountain in one of the Western states, and he had no, of course, source of water other than rainwater. And he collected rainwater off his roof, and it all ran down into cisterns that was his source of water. And he had these big pools of water and these big water tanks that held water. He was just collecting rainwater as a way to live on this mountaintop. And the Western state, whichever government it was—I think it was Colorado, but I’m not certain of that—they fined him and convicted him of a crime for collecting rainwater. They said the rainwater belongs to the state, and you cannot, by collecting it for your own use, you are diverting state property. The rainwater should be allowed to run into the ground and into a river and the property of the state. Even though firefighters said, “We use the water he collected when we have to put out fires in his area.” So that story just came to mind. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it; it was widely reported at the time. And he actually was sentenced to jail for collecting rainwater because he said, “I’m not going to stop.” So that’s how extreme this—go ahead, Myron.
The Endangered Species Act and the Spotted Owl [29:40]
Myron Ebell: Bob, there are numerous similar stories involving the Endangered Species Act in California, where landowners were not allowed to farm their land—to actually their traditional farming practices were prohibited to protect certain endangered species. The most famous one is some years ago now, the Stevens kangaroo rat in Southern California. The landowners involved were told, “You have to stop farming because when you plow the land or disk it, you’re likely to kill some endangered kangaroo rats.” And the result was the brush grew up, there was a huge, very hot fire that went through the area, it destroyed some homes and a lot of other property, and it also, of course, killed a lot of kangaroo rats because kangaroo rats really don’t like fire—they don’t do well in fire. And so, you know, that’s the kind of perverse incentives that government provides to private property owners that leads to environmental destruction.
Bob Zadek: Now, another contribution to the intensity of wildfires is the attack on logging in the Northwest, Oregon, and parts of California. What is the theory? What made logging, which is nothing other than harvesting a crop, albeit a wooden crop—what made logging so much of—loggers so much of a pariah species that logging was virtually closed up, destroying jobs? And what was the effect of the ban on logging on the subject this morning, which is forest management and wildfires?
Myron Ebell: It’s a long, fairly complicated story, but I’ll give you a couple of highlights. The first is the most productive and valuable forests in the world are the Douglas fir forests. Douglas fir is a tremendous tree; it grows in Western Oregon, Northern California, Western Washington. And these forests require clear-cutting. Douglas fir will not reproduce if you cut some of the trees and leave others so that the ground remains in shade. Douglas fir seeds will not grow up into trees. So, what Douglas fir needs is clear-cutting or, in fact, catastrophic fire that burns it all down.
And so, the environmental movement mounted a campaign against clear-cutting, and then they mounted a campaign to claim that a little owl called the Northern Spotted Owl was endangered because of timber production, because of logging. And the spotted owls needed these old-growth forests and we had to stop cutting them. And so there were two campaigns going on: one was against clear-cutting, the other was “we have to just stop logging because of the spotted owl.” Now, in fact, the spotted owl requires quite a lot of open ground because the squirrel it eats does not live in old-growth forests. The big forests where there’s no sunlight on the ground because of all the tree cover. So spotted owls actually are endangered in old-growth forests. The environmentalists were correct about that, but that’s because they can’t actually survive in old-growth forests. They need second-growth forests that have a lot of open space so that the squirrels that they eat have something to eat. And so the whole thing has grown up as a result of complete miseducation about how the forests operate and what animals like the spotted owl need to survive. So the whole thing is basically a con game that has been perpetrated on the people who live in rural Northern California, Western Oregon. We closed down all the sawmills, and now we burn up those forests rather than provide timber for the national economy.
Private vs. Public Forest Management [33:58]
Bob Zadek: Explain clear-cutting for those of us who grew up on pavement and only saw a tree when we went to the arboretum or something like that. Explain what clear-cutting is.
Myron Ebell: Right. Well, most types of forest, the proper way to manage them is to select trees and to thin the forest. So you don’t just cut everything down like you’re cutting a lawn or a wheat field. You select and cut trees here and there, and you leave a lot of the trees, and that will create a healthy forest. Douglas fir is different. As I said, it’s the most valuable forest in the world, and it requires—Douglas firs cannot reproduce except in open ground, sunny open ground. So you don’t have to clear hundreds of thousands of acres, but when you’re managing a Douglas fir forest, you have to go in and take a section, a piece of ground—how many acres is up to the forester, it might be a few acres or it might be a few hundred acres—and you have to clear the whole area. You have to cut down all the trees, not just selective trees. So that’s what, you know, when the environmental movement started showing photographs of clear-cut ground and they said, “Well, this is monstrous that they’re just destroying this ancient forest and they’re cutting down all the trees.” Well, that’s what Douglas fir need, and that’s what never got through in the public debate.
Bob Zadek: And there’s no recognition that even large, majestic Douglas fir trees, as well as redwoods, are nothing other than a harvestable crop which will—the land will recycle and you’ll constantly have new growth and you’ll have enough so there’ll always be a forest. It’s looked upon—we’re all reciting from memory Joyce Kilmer, “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.” It’s as if everybody has memorized that, and that’s what governs their decisions.
Now, what struck me as being strange in the whole government regulation of forest management is that some of the forests are owned privately. Paper companies, obviously, they own forest land—that’s their raw material—or they have harvesting rights if they can still get them from public land. Why in the world would government not leave private forest management to the owners who are managing a forest for profit? And if they do a bad job managing the forest, they will go out of business. Isn’t that the greatest control on good forest management? And is there data that indicates that private forests are better managed, specifically with regard to forest fires but other management measurement as well? Is there a difference between how private forests are managed versus those that are under the control and ownership of the government?
Myron Ebell: Yes, Bob, you’ve got that exactly right. Private landowners have the correct incentives to take care of their land. If you have a resource on your land, if you don’t take care of it, you will lose the value of that resource. And that’s why private ownership is the basis of sound environmental management and conservation. Public ownership—and that’s really the terrible thing about the West, and I’m a rural Westerner from Eastern Oregon—Oregon is over 50% federally owned. California is nearly 50% federally owned. Nevada is something like 85% or 87% federally owned. So what we have in the forests of the Northwest is mostly federal ownership, and the people who manage those forests are not particularly bad people; they’re just people like all of us, but they have the wrong incentives.
Whereas the big timber companies that own some of the Northwest and some of Northern California, they have the correct incentives, and therefore their land, their forests are in better condition and they are less subject to catastrophic fires and to disease because they are more intensively managed than our national forests and our national parks. A lot of our national forest areas, you know, have been turned into wilderness areas, so you can’t manage that at all, and these wilderness areas tend to become, you know, where the trouble starts—where disease, where too much forest growth, too thick a forest grows up, and then disease hits and then they die, and that’s where the fires start. So, yeah, no, the private landowners tend to have—not every single one, but private landowners on average are much better stewards of the environment because, as you said, they have the correct incentives.
Federalism and State Management [48:00]
Bob Zadek: And what’s interesting is—well, two observations. Number one, the environmental movement now, they believe, as you have explained to us this morning, that nature must not be interfered with, that forests must be left alone with no human intervention, even positive intervention—the purity of it all. And forest fires are simply nature being nature. And if you say let nature take its course for better or for worse, then you are saying “let ‘em burn,” because that’s nature. And in this case, the human intervention is designed to take our accumulated wisdom and use that to better manage the forest and not let nature alone control what the forests are like.
And the second observation is once you have government involved, now government equals the political process. Which means now you have all of the ugliness of the political process with lobbyists and popular movements that get people elected who get to control governmental action. Now you have decisions being made through the political process, which is the opposite of purity, and therefore decisions are made for all the wrong reasons based on popular will and on fads. And so the combination of the two is leading to the destruction of the forest because the goal of the environmental movement is not sound forest management. It’s a different goal, it’s a greater goal, it’s an economic goal dressed up as an environmental movement. Am I being too harsh or not harsh enough?
Myron Ebell: Bob, I think you’ve got it about right. I mean, the problem we face as originally a rural agro-American, and the problem that we face is that the people who live in rural America are much better land managers and are much better protectors of the environment than people who live in the cities and contribute to the Sierra Club and get those lovely wildlife calendars. And it’s not that people in the urban areas are ill-intentioned; it’s not that they’re bad people or that they don’t want to do good. It’s that they have this kind of belief that they’re smarter than the people who actually live and deal with the environment on a daily basis. So you mentioned, you know, your kind of clear-cutting is pavement. Well, you know, people who live in San Francisco and Los Angeles, there are a lot more people there than there are in your rural counties in California, and they tend to be wealthier and they’re more plugged in, and they assume that they know more—that this managerial elite class, urban people, their weakness is that they think that they know more than just the poor stupid people who live on the farm and loggers and farmers and ranchers. And of course, the truth is exactly the opposite. And that’s a lot of the problem with the environmental condition of the West now. And you see exactly the same thing in Australia, where the people who live there and who know about how to manage their own environment are continually told by urban people working through government, through compulsory government programs, that they have to do this and that, and they have to protect this endangered species in this way, even though the way that the government is telling them to protect the endangered species will actually lead to environmental mismanagement and eventually the decline of the species that we supposedly want to protect. And we see this with the spotted owl, we saw it with the Stevens kangaroo rat in California, and you’re seeing it now in Australia with the destruction of the forests killing all kinds of cuddly animals that we like—wombats and koala bears and so on.
Bob Zadek: What strikes me—I am, of course, I have written about how I bemoan the loss of good old-fashioned 18th-century federalism. This is a perfect test where if forest management were turned over to the states, states we would see that California would manage its forests differently than perhaps Montana, Wyoming—maybe not Oregon—but Montana, more states off the Western coast. And by example, the best practices would be shown to be the best by actual side-by-side comparisons. But right now, where we have environmental policy almost exclusively under the control of one federal government, there’s no chance to have, as Brandeis said, the laboratories of innovation, where one state will experiment and discover a better way to do it. This is a classic example where good old-fashioned federalism would help us learn what’s the best forest management practice.
Myron Ebell: Yes, and I think California doesn’t have much state forest. It has a fair amount of privately owned forest. Some states in the Rocky Mountains do have more state forest, and by and large, they are much better managed than the national forests. And one of the reasons is because in some of the Western states, the state forests and the state lands have to be managed on a profitable basis because the money generated goes to support the school districts. So they have an incentive that is much better attuned to good management than our national forests do. So I favor privatizing the West. I think we need a lot more private land and a lot less federal land. But if we had to pick a middle alternative, state-owned land rather than federal land is better. Private land is still better than state-owned land, but if we can’t privatize the West, we at least ought to be talking about turning over federal lands to state management.
Conclusion and the Competitive Enterprise Institute [50:42]
Bob Zadek: I couldn’t agree more. And that is, of course, a lot of the message of your writing and your testifying and also the message of CEI, the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Before we are closed up here this morning, tell us a bit about Competitive Enterprise Institute and how our listeners can follow their work.
Myron Ebell: CEI was founded in 1984 by Fred Smith, a good government regulator turned into a free-marketeer when he moved to Washington and saw how the EPA actually worked. And he realized that if you actually want to protect the environment, big government can’t possibly be the solution. And so CEI was founded in 1984 as a free-market group, but we’re not like some of the bigger ones; we focus almost exclusively on regulation. So we focus on environmental regulation, financial, labor, antitrust—any regulation, any red tape or bureaucracy, CEI works on it. So you can find out about us at cei.org.
Bob Zadek: So CEI is the way, or your support of CEI is the way to incrementally get the government off our backs. CEI is doing God’s work. I urge our listeners to do as I do, which is support CEI. Thank you very much this morning for your wisdom and for the work you have done on the environment and for getting us out of the Paris Climate Accords. Thank you so much to our listeners, and have a happy Sunday and, of course, Go Niners!