Wildfires Aren’t Started by an Angry Mother Earth

By Dominic Pino

Thursday, August 17, 2023

 

I talked about this on The Editors podcast on Tuesday, and reporting since then continues to point toward my conclusion: Focusing on climate change at the expense of every other environmental issue is bad for the environment.

 

This is in the context of the wildfires in Hawaii, which are the deadliest wildfires in the U.S. in over 100 years. Based on media coverage of wildfires, you would likely think that they just happen as a result of hot weather, but that’s not how they work at all. About 85 percent of wildfires are human-caused — not by carbon emissions raising the planet’s temperature, but by failing to take adequate precautions around fire sources.

 

Sometimes it’s careless campers failing to put out their campfire. Other times it’s electric utilities failing to maintain their equipment. As I said on Tuesday, the stock price of Hawaiian Electric, the island state’s electric utility, tanked amid speculation that the company’s equipment had sparked the fire. Based on reporting today from the Wall Street Journal, it seems like the markets were right:

 

The fire’s cause hasn’t been determined, but mounting evidence suggests the utility’s equipment was involved. One video taken by a resident shows a downed power line igniting dry grass along a road near Lahaina. A firm that monitors grid sensors reported dozens of electrical disruptions in the hours before the fire began, including one that coincided in time with video footage of a flash of light from power lines.

 

Hawaiian Electric said it would investigate any role its infrastructure may have played and cooperate with a separate probe into the fire launched last week by the Hawaii attorney general.

 

That’s circumstantial evidence, and we don’t have all the facts yet. What we do know is that, under pressure from the government, Hawaiian Electric was all-in on the green agenda and was dragging its feet on wildfire prevention. The Journal reports:

 

Hawaiian Electric has made reference in regulatory filings to the risks of power-line fires, but it waited years to take significant action, documents and interviews show. During that period, the company was undertaking a state-mandated shift to renewable energy. . . .

 

Hawaii has been on a push to convert to renewables since 2008, when a run-up in oil prices sent electrical rates at Hawaiian Electric—which relied on petroleum imports for 80% of its energy supply—through the roof. In 2015, lawmakers passed legislation mandating that the state derive 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045, the first such requirement in the U.S.

 

The company dove into reaching the goals, stating in 2017 that it would reach the benchmark five years ahead of schedule.

 

In 2019, under pressure to replace the output of two conventional power plants set to retire, the company sought to contract for 900 megawatts of renewable energy, the most it had pursued at any one time.

 

“You have to look at the scope and scale of the transformation within [Hawaiian Electric] that was occurring throughout the system,” said Mina Morita, who chaired the state utilities commission from 2011 to 2015. “While there was concern for wildfire risk, politically the focus was on electricity generation.”

 

The drive to reach the renewable goals also preoccupied private energy companies working with Hawaiian Electric and state energy officials, said Doug McLeod, a consultant who served for several years as the Maui county energy commissioner.

 

“Looking back with hindsight, the business opportunities were on the generation side, and the utility was going out for bid with all these big renewable-energy projects,” he said. “But in retrospect, it seems clear, we weren’t as focused on these fire risks as we should have been.”

 

Wildfires in Hawaii aren’t usual. They’ve gotten worse over the past five to ten years because of invasive species of grass that have spread throughout the islands. Protecting habitats from invasive species is part of environmentalism — but it’s not about climate change, so it goes largely ignored by the media and activists.

 

Wildfires don’t happen because Mother Earth is angry with us. Forest and wildlife professionals devote their careers to managing fire risks, based both on scientific research and on best practices that have been developed over many years of experience. As scientists quoted in Veronique de Rugy’s post earlier today said, wildfires are among the natural disasters least affected by climate change. The media and activists do everyone a disservice by portraying every environmental issue as a climate issue.