https://nypost.com/2025/01/08/us-news/la-mayor-karen-bass-cut-fire-department-funding-by-17-6m/
LA Mayor Karen Bass cut fire department funding by $17.6M — months before wildfires turned city into hellscape
The drastic decrease in funding for the fire department was the second-largest cut to come out of embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass‘ 2024-25 fiscal year budget, according to city figures.
The police budget, meanwhile, increased by $126 million, a graphic shared by LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia shows.
Bass had initially wanted to cut the fire department by even more — a staggering $23 million.
The details on Bass’ budget slashing resurfaced as the mayor faced widespread backlash Wednesday after it was revealed she was away in Africa for the Ghana president’s inauguration — even as wind-whipped wildfires turned parts of her city into an apocalyptic hellscape.
In her absence, Bass found time to praise firefighters and other emergency crews for working “overnight to protect Angelenos affected by fires.”
After cutting the fire department budget, LA Mayor Karen Bass traipsed off to Ghana this week. @MayorOfLA https://t.co/QqBBmYsu23 pic.twitter.com/i3QY1jzoXe
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) January 8, 2025
This post is true. Every single time the California voter had the opportunity to bring water not only to all of California but to our farmers and our growers, Newsom stood against it.
For anyone who has ever driven north or southbound on Interstate 5 or California 99 sees the… pic.twitter.com/VrMKAwwotp
— Jack Hibbs (@RealJackHibbs) January 8, 2025
“The ‘wildfire problem’ is essentially more a social than a natural one.” Researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid found that “climate change” is not to blame for increased forest fires in the Mediterranean basin.”…
“In the United States, wildfires are also due in part to a failure to thin forests or remove dead and diseased trees.
Pielke Jr.: “The IPCC has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change
Globally, emissions from wildfires has decreased globally over recent decades, as well as in many regions
Canada wildfire trends show no increase in recent decades
Wildfires used to be much more extensive in past centuries
Wildfires are a part of the natural eco-system.”
Lomborg on Global wildfires: For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward. In 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a record low of 2.2% burned area…The latest report by the United Nations’ climate panel doesn’t attribute the area burned globally by wildfires to climate change. Instead, it vaguely suggests the weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in some places. Still, the report finds that the change in these weather conditions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the century. …
America wildfires: While the complete data aren’t in for 2023, global tracking up to July 29 by the Global Wildfire Information System shows that more land has burned in the Americas than usual. But much of the rest of the world has seen lower burning — Africa and especially Europe. Globally, the GWIS shows that burned area is slightly below the average between 2012 and 2022, a period that already saw some of the lowest rates of burned area.
Australian Wildfires: Likewise, while Australia’s wildfires in 2019-20 earned media headlines such as “Apocalypse Now” and “Australia Burns,” the satellite data show this was a selective narrative. The burning was extraordinary in two states but extraordinarily small in the rest of the country. Since the early 2000s, when 8% of Australia caught fire, the area of the country torched each year has declined. The 2019-20 fires scorched 4% of Australian land, and this year the burned area will likely be even less.
When reading headlines about fires, remember the other climate scare tactics that proved duds. Polar bears were once the poster cubs for climate action, yet are now estimated to be more populous than at any time in the past half-century. We were told climate change would produce more hurricanes, yet satellite data shows that the number of hurricanes globally since 1980 has trended slightly downward.
June 25, 2024
