The Maui-Disaster Narrative Is All Wrong

By Wilfred Reilly

Friday, September 01, 2023

 

The recent fires in Maui provide awake citizens and inveterate bureaucrat-watchers like myself with an unexpected bi-fecta: a tragic but instructive collision of a once-in-a-decade disaster and a once-in-a-decade example of Narrative Creation.

 

What happened in Maui, in plain empirical terms, is simple enough to describe. On August 8, 2023, “a brush fire ignited in West Maui,” near the popular resort town of Lahaina. Strong winds pushed the fire, at an unexpectedly fast pace, into downtown Lahaina, where more than 2,000 buildings were destroyed — including several notable landmarks. Damage estimates for the fire currently sit at roughly $6 billion, which, for purposes of comparison, is three times the total losses from the full 2020–21 summer of George Floyd riots.

 

Far more seriously, at least 115 people were killed by the blaze, some burned alive. Another 388 people, an estimate somehow down from an initial figure of more than 1,000, remain missing and are almost certainly dead. Survivors of the inferno describe an eerie, almost apocalyptic scene, with hundreds forced to jump into the ocean from burning or exploding cars after traffic became backed up on the single ocean-side road leading out of town.

 

The U.S. mainstream-media reaction to the Hawaii fires was, without playing politics too much with tragedy, roughly what a cynical empiricist would expect it to be during a historic catastrophe, taking place under Democratic local and national administrations, not long before an election. In contrast to the famously harsh coverage of then-president George W. Bush during the Hurricane Katrina disaster — Bush was mocked for flying over and “scoping out” deluged New Orleans rather than immediately landing, and rapper Kanye West, then presumably sane, claimed that the president didn’t “care about black people” — the Lahaina response of leaders in general and President Biden in particular has often been described warmly.

 

The octogenarian president, who at one point at least appeared to fall asleep while visiting Maui a week or two after the fires, was widely praised for hitting the right notes during his on-ground incident response. A fairly typical CNN headline read “Biden Works to Console and Demonstrate Action as He Witnesses Tragedy in Hawaii First-Hand,” and a prominent correspondent for the same television network hailed Biden as “the empathizer in chief.” Many other major outlets were quick to describe global climate change as a perhaps unstoppable force lurking behind the fires, and the AP wire actually led a list of the variables responsible with “climate change.”

 

As usual, reality here looks very different from the Official Storyline, which is complete, fertilizer-grade BS. Far from being a downstream result of global trends no mortal hand might halt, against which leaders battled heroically, the Lahaina tragedy appears to have been caused or at least exacerbated by a remarkable combination of incompetent human errors. For example, almost unbelievably, the Hawaiian official in charge of releasing water to fight the blaze — one M. Kaleo Manuel — neglected to do so for more than five hours as the area burning greatly increased in size.

 

This seems to have occurred at least partly for DEI/“equity” reasons. Manuel, who is partly of Native Hawaiian extraction, has previously “described water as a sacred God” in televised debates. On the unfortunate 8th of August, he apparently consulted with local traditional farmers before releasing any of Kanaloa’s bounty for firefighting — having previously noted that water access should always follow “conversations about equity.” For good measure, local officials managed to activate exactly zero of Maui’s 80–85 civil-defense/disaster warning sirens, and sent “confusing” social-media messages about what exactly to expect throughout the fateful day.

 

Perhaps most insanely, it now appears almost certain that thousands of people were trapped on the burning highway leading out of Lahaina because officials trapped them there. This should cause absolute, widespread outrage. As conservative broadcaster Matt Walsh has pointed out, multiple on-video wildfire survivors have stated that they were prevented from leaving the town by formal police barricades across the primary road out of it.

 

Quite simply, only those citizens quick-thinking and aggressive enough to disobey orders and just drive around the protesting cops — or, later, jump out of their burning cars and swim for it — survived. And what was the justification later given by local apparats for forcing Americans back into an obviously growing inferno? Well, there were broken power lines lying across some stretches of the escape route, and driving over those could be dangerous!

 

Damned-near unbelievable. And all of this matters. If the cause of 500-odd brutal deaths in the U.S.A.’s loveliest state — and at least a large chunk of recent Greek and Canadian wildfires, by the by — was not in fact the 0.3 percent increase in global mean temperature over the past few decades, but instead more-obvious factors like “excessive DEI” or “too much brush in the woods,” then we can prevent other major disasters simply by fixing these lesser problems. More broadly, if we can mitigate the effects of climate change itself simply by painting surfaces such as roofs with new varieties of refractive paint — as now seems possible — there is no reason not to do so and no need at all for mass societal change.

 

It seems worth noting here that the American and European academies have an absurdly long history of making doomsday predictions that proved to be laughably false, either due to incremental human responses of the kind just detailed or to simple modeling errors. A short list of these might include: Peak Oils 1–7 (?), the “Club of Rome” prediction that the Earth would run out of resources by the 1990s, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 Population Bomb prediction that overpopulation was going to kill us all, the Y2K collapse (we simply rewrote the code), killer bees and the Great Northerly Migration, the Western heterosexual AIDS epidemic, the “Hammer and the Dance” Covid-19 models, and even global cooling.

 

The global warming that terrifies the good rule-heeding burghers of today is real enough. However, it has almost literally nothing to do with most phenomena attributed to it. And, in my actual professional opinion, there is a 0.00 percent chance we actually have “just twelve years” to fix our current, rather minor problems or go the way of ankylosaurus.

 

Obvious points like these — the Hawaiian wildfires widely attributed to climate change were due entirely to trackable human incompetence; many major climate models barely adjust for human innovation and are certain to be wrong — lead to a fairly important point about intellectual theory: Theory has to gel with and explain what we actually see in reality, without being pushed or abused, or it is worthless. If, say, “long Covid” is allegedly causing a “mass disabling event” indicated by conditions like cardiac failure, are we actually seeing a dramatic increase in heart attacks, something we track every year, in the U.S. or the U.K.? If not, there’s likely a problem with the theory.

 

Theories that do not meet this simple explanatory standard, like so many we see around disaster and war and other things that truly matter, may be treated as golden by all The Experts™ — but are also worth their weight in gold.

 

If so inclined, you can use these links to help the Lahaina victims.