All summer we have been bombarded by propaganda about how global warming has been sparking environmental disasters.

It’s pretty obvious this is a coordinated effort. Wildfires in Canada that were indeed caused by human activity–arson, to be precise–are being blamed on climate change. Wildfires in California, and now a tropical storm, have gotten the same treatment. And who can forget the initial “climate change” explanation for the Lahaina fire, which died down for a few days but is getting back into full swing?

In the latter two cases, the fires were sparked by poor maintenance by power companies that have been laser-focused on renewable generation rather than doing basic preventive maintenance, with an assist from poor forest management.

Wildfires are nothing new and in fact are a necessary part of the cycle of life in nature. They are a problem and must be managed because they present a danger to human beings, not because they are somehow surprising and new.

They do, however, present a great opportunity for propaganda.

Ironically Air Force One will burn 53,000 gallons of jet fuel to get POTUS to Maui for a few hours to survey the damage to justify declaring a climate emergency.
https://t.co/lfhowdQ8o2

— US Oil & Gas Association (@US_OGA) August 21, 2023

The propaganda has been leading to one place: the declaration of a climate “emergency.”

As we saw during COVID the declaration of an emergency allows the president to break all the rules. Going back to the time of the Founders it was understood that at times an energetic executive is a necessary evil. Sometimes big things must get done fast, which means circumventing the rules. Imagine waiting for Congress to pass a law to empower a president to address a major earthquake, a volcano in the Pacific Northwest, or an invasion at the border.

Conversely, nothing that is a longer-term problem is an “emergency.” If the time scale is greater than a few weeks then it should be a political issue, not merely an executive issue.

To put this in context: mobilizing resources to help the residents of Maui is an emergency; setting policies for dealing with wildfires is an issue that should be addressed using the normal processes of democratic government.

Ironically, Biden has not treated the Maui disaster as an emergency. The federal government has done relatively little to address the crisis that residents face. The military–whose presence is enormous in Hawaii–has not been mobilized. The feds who have shown up are mostly bureaucrats, not crisis responders.

And Biden? He is Mr. “No Comment.” He will finally show up this week–after 2 vacations since the Maui fire–for a few hours.

"Any comment on the rising death toll in Maui?"

BIDEN: "No. No comment." pic.twitter.com/oORpRuLUpz

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 14, 2023

By now we know that the death toll could easily hit 1000 or more–they are hiding the number of children who likely died–and yet this is not being treated as an emergency.

Climate change–a problem that even its most vocal proponents admit is measured on the time scale of decades–is likely going to be declared an “emergency” either before or after the election.

As President Joe Biden prepares to visit Maui, the Hawaiian island devastated by the deadliest wildfire in U.S. modern history, lawmakers and climate groups are begging the White House to do more to prevent future climate-related disasters.

Their argument: If the latest environmental catastrophe won’t spur the president into action, what will?

The fires, likely sparked by the island’s electric utility and heightened by climate change impacts, swept through the Pacific paradise last week, killing at least 110 people and leaving the famed town of Lahaina smoldering in ruins. As survivors search for missing family members and friends, and a housing crisis unfolds amid the vast destruction, climate activists and members of Congress are urging Biden to declare a national emergency over climate change.

It isn’t the first time the White House has faced calls to take this step, but the ongoing crisis in Hawaii and a string of climate events this summer — including this weekend’s first-ever tropical storm warning for southern California — have intensified the appeals, building pressure on the president ahead of his scheduled trip to the island disaster site Monday.

If you believe the climate alarmists–which I don’t–our entire energy infrastructure will have to be reworked to have any effect in the coming decades. It will take decades to do this. There is literally no action that we could take today that would change the trajectory of climate change in the near term. And without international unanimity nothing the US does will make a dramatic difference on any time scale that could be measured in presidential terms.

Half of all addresses in the contiguous United States face some wildfire risk, meaning that tens of millions of lives may be vulnerable to some of the same failures that engulfed Lahaina. https://t.co/BL6cFh6RRE

— Linda Hill (@bulldoghill) August 21, 2023

It was the firestorm that wildfire experts and residents on Maui had warned about for years — a blaze fueled by hurricane winds roaring through untamed grasses and into a 13,000-person coastal town with few ways in or out. Local officials had released plan after plan acknowledging that wildfire was all but certain.

But when the nightmare fire erupted across Lahaina on Aug. 8, killing at least 114 people and possibly scores more, systems that had been put in place to sound the alarm and bring people to safety collapsed, residents and experts said.

Cellphone sites were burned and lost power, leaving people unable to communicate or receive emergency alerts. Two main roads providing escape routes out of town were closed because of flames and downed power lines, funneling evacuees into an inferno of gridlock along a coastal road where many burned inside their cars. Powerful emergency sirens never made a sound. Fire hoses almost ran dry.

And while fire departments and wildfire-preparedness groups have long urged people in fire-prone areas like West Maui to be ready and leave early, other advice from the authorities was far less concrete. The state of Hawaii’s own guide for how people should respond to hurricanes, tsunamis and other disasters does not include any direction on what to do in a wildfire.

Even taking the word of the most hysterical climate alarmists, climate change is not an emergency by any definition. It is a long-term problem. If wildfires are rising in number, they will continue to do so on decadal time scales. If hurricanes are becoming more frequent and/or more damaging (they aren’t) they will continue to do so. Nothing we do today will have any short-term impact.

Something can be a dire threat (climate change isn’t) without being an “emergency.” Chronic problems are not emergencies. They must be addressed through management. Think diabetes vs. a heart attack.

The demand to declare a climate “emergency” is nothing more than Leftists demanding that we circumvent democratic processes because they don’t like the results. They want an emergency because it empowers the president to ignore the rules.

“Even when I talk about this issue, I tend to say things like, ‘I want to make sure my children have clean air and water — that they have running water. That they have a livable planet when they’re my age.’ But that’s not right. Tomorrow, you could wake up and your whole community could be ashes,” said Kaniela Ing, a seventh-generation indigenous Hawaiian from Maui and the national director of the Green New Deal Network, a climate justice organization.

“That’s the urgency we’re operating under,” he added, “so if there was ever a moment to declare a climate emergency, it is right now.”

Alongside climate groups, many of Biden’s allies in Congress have urged him to invoke emergency powers, which would enable the president to take sweeping action to restrain greenhouse gas production, implement large-scale clean transportation solutions and finance distributed energy projects, among other actions.

If you have ever wondered why we live in a constant state of media panic, this is it. Not only does it goose the ratings, but all those “experts” they trot out who spend every waking hour panic-mongering are shilling for the powers that be who are demaning more power and less accountability.

But again, look at Hawaii. The reason so many people died was the utter failure of the powers that be. The power company failed. The firefighters failed to contain the fire because the state government failed to release water (kudos to their efforts though). The emergency management failed to warn people. The police and state patrol boxed residents in, not allowing them to escape. And now FEMA, the state, and the entire federal government are botching the recovery.

These are the people demanding yet more power. They can’t even do the basics, and they want to manage the entire economy.

A climate “emergency” would be nothing more than a license to plunder America. If wildfires are a problem, address the problem whether it is caused by climate change or not. Hawaii spends only a few million a year on wildfire prevention and/or fighting wildfires. Only $2 per resident. For almost 2 decades people have been screaming for more resources and nobody cared.

Governors have known that wildfire suppression funding has been insufficient for at least 16 years.

The funding for wildfire falls under DOFAW’s Native Resources and Fire Protection program, which this year got $17.2 million.

That money is not just for wildfire. It also has to cover native species management, invasive species suppression and the upkeep of Hawaii’s innumerable ecosystems.

A memo prepared by Gov. Josh Green’s administration in January said that the program had “minimal resources” to carry out its wildfire mandate. That memo was sent to the Legislature to inform deliberations on bills and the budget.

It said money was the program’s “greatest obstacle” and that it had “a critical lack of staff.”

The memo went further, saying there was “a lack of public investment” necessary to avoid, fight and clean up wildfires, “despite existing and increasing risks to public health, safety, and the environment from the effects of wildfire.”

That message was relayed to lawmakers 16 years ago almost verbatim, in a memo submitted by former Gov. Linda Lingle.

And now we are being told that in order to address the problem the government needs control over the entire US economy.

How about spending $5 or $10 per resident on wildfires instead? It might actually save lives.

You can bet that sometime in the next couple of years Biden will declare a climate emergency because, well, he can.

We simply can’t let Biden win again in 2024. A climate emergency will mean the end of American freedom. The COVID pandemic-style response, only forever.