Last night, CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck blamed California’s massive wildfires on the “damn environmentalists” and their “bad environmental policies.” He also claimed that global warming has nothing to do with the situation, stating, “[I]f I hear global warming one more time, blood is going to shoot out of my eyes.”

To prove his points, he brought on R.J. Smith of the Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute and Chris Horner, author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism. Horner — who is also a senior fellow at CEI — predictably argued that “[g]lobal warming is not a likely suspect” for the fires and Smith said that “the greens have made things worse by stopping all [fuels] management.” Watch it:

These claims have been echoed by the right-wing blogs. Michelle Malkin blamed “litigious environmentalists” for “standing in the way” of Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative (HFI).

In 2002, Bush proposed HFI, which advocated “thinning” forests to decrease the risk of wildfires. But more than anything else, it was an attempt to curry favor with the timber and logging industries, which donated more than $1 million to Bush’s 2000 campaign. HFI allowed loggers to cut down large, valuable trees miles from at-risk communities, allegedly in order to finance the removal of the smaller brush that fuels wildfires.

Environmentalists don’t oppose removing brush and chapparal in at-risk areas, but logging in backforests has nothing to do with wildfire prevention. Removing brush is not a solution in itself. A 2006 study by Prof. A.L. Westerling, et al. concludes that addressing global warming needs to go hand-in-hand:

[L]arge increases in wildfire driven by increased temperatures and earlier spring snowmelts in forests where land-use history had little impact on fire risks indicates that ecological restoration and fuels management alone will not be sufficient to reverse current wildfire trends.

Earlier this year, the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC wrote that “a warming climate encourages wildfires through a longer summer period that dries fuels, promoting easier ignition and faster spread.” Los Angeles went 150 days without measurable rainfall this past year, and such drought will likely get worse. A group of leading British climate scientists found that extreme drought will affect about a third of the planet and spread across half of the earth’s land surface by 2100 because of global warming.

The Center for American Progress’s Daniel J. Weiss has more about global warming’s effects on wildfires.

UPDATE: Michael Roston at Huffington Post points out that in June, government auditors warned the Bush administration about shortcomings in its firefighting plan.

UPDATE II: Joe Romm at Climate Progress and Adam Siegel at EnergySmart have more.

Digg It!

Transcript: Read more

A new poll finds that the American public not only doubts whether the Bush administration’s foreign policy is working, but is “increasingly skeptical about whether anything can turn the situation around.” Seventy-nine percent believe that the world “has become more dangerous” for the United States, and 64 percent “think the rest of the world sees the U.S. negatively.”

More play for the weirdly ignored Alan Placa issue from Melinda Henneberger at Slate‘s newish XX Factor blog (I hope men read the site; it’s very good but seems to have been branded in a way that may prevent people from checking it out). To try to put a little more substance behind the simple fact that it’s odd that Rudy would choose to surround himself with a child molester, this seems to be part of a broader pattern of questionable personnel decisions in Giuliani’s career, going all the way back to firing Bill Bratton for being too successful, the whole Bernard Kerik mess, etc.

One thing we’ve seen during the Bush years is that these kind of staffing decisions matter. What you want is a president who thinks to himself, “if I mostly populate the government with qualified people who know what they’re doing, the government will be run well and that will reflect well on me in ways that serve my interests.” What you don’t want is someone who thinks that the ability to give out jobs is primarily about building a patronage network of loyalists who owe you big-time because nobody else would touch them with a ten foot pole.

Heather Hurlburt on Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to re-invent himself as a Red Sox fan: “That would be the sports equivalent of, say, wrapping yourself in a major national tragedy for purely political reasons? Getting married three times and then discovering that other people’s behavior puts our social fabric at risk?”

In light of the administration’s increasingly threatening rhetoric on Iran, CQ reports that members of Congress are worried by Bush’s recent budget proposal. In particular, they cite his request to equip B-2 “stealth” bombers with a new 30,000-pound bunker buster as a “sign of plans for an attack on Iran“:

Buried in the $196.4 billion supplemental war spending proposal that Bush submitted to Congress on Oct. 22 is a request for $88 million to modify B-2 bombers so they can drop a Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, a conventional bomb still in development that is the most powerful weapon designed to destroy targets deep underground.

A White House summary accompanying the supplemental spending proposal said the request for money to modify ­B-2s to carry the bombs came in response to “an urgent operational need from theater commanders.” [...]

Previous statements by the Defense Department and the program’s contractors, along with interviews with military experts, suggest the weapon is meant for the kind of hardened targets found chiefly in Iran.

The B-2 bomber and MOPs are reportedly choice weapons for strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. In January, the BBC reported that the administration had drawn up plans for “long range B2 stealth bombers” to “drop ‘bunker-busting‘ bombs” in an effort to penetrate, for example, the Natanz enrichment facility in Iran.

The MOP has been in development for several years. After its completion, a U.S. military officer proudly described the destructive power of the bunker buster, specifically saying it could be used against Iran:

The U.S. has a 14-ton super bomb more destructive than the vacuum bomb just tested by Russia, a U.S. general said Wednesday.

The statement was made by retired Lt. General McInerney, chairman of the Iran Policy Committee, and former Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

McInerney said the U.S. has “a new massive ordnance penetrator that’s 30,000 pounds, that really penetrates … Ahmadinejad has nothing in Iran that we can’t penetrate.”

– Mike Kuykendall

This post was submitted through our Blog Fellows program. Make your own contribution — and get paid for it — by clicking here.

Richard Griffin, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, announced his resignation today “in the wake of last month’s deadly Blackwater USA shooting incident in Baghdad and growing questions about the use of private contractors in Iraq.” The State Department has been “sharply” criticized for its “poor coordination, communication, oversight and accountability” involving contractors.