by Daniel Greenfield
Instead of preparing for wildfires, Hawaii was busy going "green."
[Frontpage Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Politicians, the media and environmentalists spent the past week blaming the Maui fires on global warming.
“That level of destruction, and a fire hurricane, something new to us in this age of global warming, was the ultimate reason that so many people perished,” Hawaii Gov. Joshua Green claimed, while ignoring his state’s mismanagement of the disaster and its botched response at every level from the power grid that wasn’t secured to the sirens that didn’t go off.
Winds whipping up a fire isn’t some exciting new disaster, it’s how things have always worked in Hawaii where about 0.5% of Hawaii’s land burns every year. The worst previous Maui fire in 2010 was fed by 40 mph winds. This time the winds hit 67 mph. The bad timing of an electrical disaster with high winds, not ‘global warming’ made for something old, not new.
But the ultimate reason so many people perished is that Hawaii government officials failed in their responsibilities toward the residents and tourists they had been milking all these years.
And, conveniently, decided to blame global warming instead of taking responsibility.
Hawaii’s Sen. Mazie Hirono told CNN that “We very much need to acknowledge that climate change is upon us,” urging the heathen to repent and bow to the exciting new apocalypse.
And the global warming circus and its endless scams was just getting started.
The board chair of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs blamed the fires on the “climate crisis” and “colonialism”. Bloomberg ran an op-ed titled ‘Maui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach’.
‘Fire and Fury: The Story of the 2023 Maui Fire and its Implications for Climate Change,’ a book written a few days into the wildfires, shot up the Amazon bestseller list. Its author, ‘Dr. Miles Stones’ appears to have been made up. But, then again, so was global warming.
A security camera captured what started the fires, and it wasn’t ‘climate change’.
A tree fell on a power line, there was an arc flash, a drop in power and the fires began. The sirens didn’t go off and the water wasn’t released in time to properly fight the fires. None of those things had anything to do with a changing climate, but with ideological mismanagement.
But if a tree falls and no one is around to see it, politicians will blame global warming.
Hawaiian Electric claims to be the “most progressive and forward thinking energy company in the world” whose mission was to “act with boldness and urgency, without fear of failure” to “build a sustainable Hawaii”. The massive devastation in Maui is proof of its accomplishments.
The progressive energy company was aware that there were serious wildfire risks, but instead it prioritized green energy programs. It failed to shut off the power in time and its trucks ended up blocking evacuation routes. But at least “the company’s focus on equity includes approaching everything we do with an equitable lens” meant that people burned to death equitably.
Given a choice between the unglamorous business of preventing wildfires or going green, Hawaiian Electric picked the option that was sure to win praise from politicians and environmentalists. Solar panels replaced actual power plants and customers were lectured incessantly about global warming and the environmental stewardship of the company.
Hawaiian Electric CEO Shelee Kimura received environmental awards and boasted of having grown the state’s “clean energy resources”’ and worked to “decarbonize Hawaii’s economy”.
The over 100 dead people have been carbonized now.
The Maui Emergency Management Agency didn’t sound the sirens to warn people to evacuate but its hazard mitigation plan was focused on fighting “climate change”.
As the fires burned, a Hawaii water official blocked release of the water. The official, Kaleo Manuel, an alumnus of the Obama Asia Pacific Leaders program, believes “that ancient wisdom and traditional ecological knowledge of native peoples will help save the Earth.”
Coming to his defense was Earthjustice, originally spun off from the defense lawyers for the environmentalist extremists of the Sierra Club.
While the scale of the fires has attracted attention, they’re not a new phenomenon. .
When the Polynesian colonists, now popularly described as “indigenous” first arrived, they slashed and burned much of the existing grasslands, wiping out whatever existed including the original population, which was killed, eaten or enslaved. The actual indigenous people of Hawaii were born as slaves, had their foreheads tattooed, and were used for human sacrifice.
Some of the leftist descendants of the colonists, heavily intermarried with westerners, have carved out an economic niche denouncing “western colonialism” and upholding “native ways” which usually involve getting an academic or bureaucratic position and pretentiously using Hawaiian terms while bemoaning the utopia that Hawaii could have been without America.
These sorts of activists, collaborating with environmentalists, helped to cause a disaster on Maui, much as their counterparts recently did in Puerto Rico by mismanaging the infrastructure, failing at their most basic responsibilities and then blaming western technology for the mess.
Hawaii’s feudal nobles believed that they were descended from the gods, its new nobility claims to be descended from the oppressed victims of colonialism and technology. They denounce the plantations and champion “native ways of growing crops” which would be unable to support their own population, never mind anyone else, and which aren’t native to Hawaii, but were brought over by their ancestors. Hawaii’s plants are more fire resistant, not because they’re superior to western agriculture, but because they had to survive the Polynesian colonizing wave of arsons.
If the professional indigenous activists are really sincere, they’ll get rid of all the technology and live the way their ancestors did without smartphones, the internet, antibiotics or indoor plumbing. Since that isn’t happening, maybe they can try to manage the technology responsibly instead of allying with leftist environmentalists to undermine the state’s infrastructure.
Climate change and colonialism didn’t cause the Maui wildfires. Environmentalists did.
It’s no coincidence that California and Hawaii were both devastated by preventable disasters. Both one-party states ignored responsible wildfire prevention policies and instead adopted the fashionable dogma that every natural disaster is caused by global warming and that the only way to head off natural disasters is by putting up solar panels and condemning technology.
These environmental policies cost human lives, homes and billions of dollars. In response to disasters caused by their neglect of infrastructure and disaster management due to their belief in global warming, the climate cult blames the resulting catastrophe on global warming.
From Hawaii’s governor on down, global warming is an excuse for corruption and incompetence. Global warming isn’t a problem, those who believe in it are.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is
an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
Islamic terrorism.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/climate-change-didnt-cause-the-maui-fires-environmentalists-did/
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