When Will Gavin Newsom Stop Deflecting Blame for the Wildfires?
His responses to criticism don’t withstand scrutiny.
The people of Los Angeles are experiencing one of the most horrific disasters in the city’s history. Wind-driven fires have raced through the canyons and into neighborhoods, destroying thousands of homes and costing dozens of lives. The ordeal has only begun; rebuilding is certain to take years. For too many Angelenos, life will never be the same.
Allegations of incompetent leadership have abounded. The public is holding accountable Mayor Karen Bass, along with the chief of the fire department and the CEO of the department of water and power. Many are also questioning Gavin Newsom’s performance as governor. Yet Newsom, perhaps as mindful of his political future as he is about the welfare of his constituents, has fought back.
Just days after the fires began, Newsom posted a webpage called California Fire Facts, seeking to counter accusations that his policies are partly to blame for the Los Angeles fires being so destructive and deadly. And since politics is a combat sport, it comes as no surprise that Newsom labels each of the points leveled against him as—capital letters for emphasis—“LIES.” Nor should it surprise anyone that among the points that Newsom selects to debunk are some preposterous claims: the fires were set to destroy “secret pedophile tunnels” before Trump took office, or started by people performing “satanic rituals.”
This sophomoric response comes at a time when a substantive discussion of what went wrong and how to fix it should be Newsom’s priority. Adding wacky claims to a list of mostly legitimate criticisms constitutes nutpicking—an attempt to discredit all criticisms by training fire on the weakest ones. And labeling all accusations against oneself, even those with a strong basis in fact, is a polarizing tactic.
Missing from Newsom’s list are many embarrassing policy mistakes for which he has no answer. His responses to the accusations he does answer leave something to be desired.
Newsom starts by attacking claims that “California Cut Firefighting Budgets,” calling this “a ridiculous lie.” The governor goes on to cite the increases in CalFIRE personnel and CalFIRE’s budget growth since 2019. He’s right that despite a recent, relatively minor budget cut, the state has steadily given CalFIRE more money over the years. During the 1980s, CalFIRE spent an average of $28 million per year ($106 million in inflation-adjusted 2024 dollars) on fire suppression. Now, as Newsom proudly proclaims, the state has increased CalFIRE’s budget to $3.8 billion. California is thus spending 35 times as much money, adjusting for inflation, to fight fires as it was four decades ago. (Though pensions and benefits consume a greater percentage of the budget today, the absolute increase in spending has occurred across the board.)
Why does Newsom assume that this is automatically a good thing? Has firefighting suddenly become less efficient? His answer is simple: climate change.
This points to the next big deception that Newsom purports to expose: that “These Wildfires are Caused by California’s Mismanagement of Forest Lands.” According to Newsom’s website, “[t]he budget for managing the forest (AKA “raking the forest”) is now ten times larger since Newsom took office—from $200 million annually before he took office to $2 billion today.
Despite Newsom’s denials, mismanagement is indeed a major culprit of the problem. As climate scientist Patrick Brown noted in City Journal, “Fire danger is a product of meteorological conditions and fuel (the presence of brush and other flammable materials).” Misguided policies, explain James B. Meigs, Shawn Regan, and Samuel Hammond, have undermined any efforts at preventing fires before they happen. Federal and state regulators, as well as environmental litigators’ recourse to such laws as the Endangered Species Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, bear much of the blame. Despite Newsom’s assurance that his throwing more money at the problem renders the forest-mismanagement critique invalid, his strategy remains futile, even as public spending on fire prevention increases.
To thin California’s forests to healthier, less flammable densities, he should relax regulations on the logging industry, while working with the Trump administration to refine the Endangered Species Act to adopt a total ecosystem approach. This would require a combination of clear cuts (limited in size and on a multidecade rotation), selective logging in sensitive areas, mechanical thinning, controlled burns, and grazing. Areas where this approach has been practiced have seen counts of endangered species rise, and they have been spared the cataclysmic wildfires that in some cases have consumed adjacent forests surrounding them.
To defend themselves and justify failed policies, Newsom and the machine he represents are making selective use of facts. Newsom’s other rebuttals include responses to the claims that “California’s smelt fish policy led to the Southern California wildfires”—that is, that its water diversion policy to protect the baitfish helped create the water shortages—and that “California Ran Out of Water and Reservoirs Are Empty.” Newsom claims that Southern California has no water shortage, and that water reservoirs in the region stand at record levels. His response is technically accurate, but it ignores a clear historical trend. For decades, the amount of water available to Southern Californians has been reduced.
In 1985, California’s total urban water consumption water was 7.5 million acre-feet. That total rose each year, peaking at nearly 10 million acre-feet in 2007. Since then, conservation measures have reduced the total, recorded at 7.5 million acre-feet in 2023. Meantime, California’s population has grown from 26 million in 1985 to nearly 40 million today. A nation-leading 94 percent of Californians live in urban areas, and they are getting by with the same amount of water today as they did 40 years ago, even as the population is 65 percent larger.
Such conservation is an impressive achievement, but the price gets paid when a huge amount of water is needed and the water isn’t there. For the last 40 years, the water infrastructure in Los Angeles has held steady, at best. Everything necessary to deliver water throughout the city is stretched to its limit. When more pumps and more pipes are required to recharge hilltop tanks and reservoirs that are being emptied to douse flames, the extra capacity is not there.
Presuming the innumeracy of the average voter, Newsom suggests that “three million gallons of water were stored in three large tanks for fire hydrants in the area before the Palisades fire, but the supply was exhausted because of the extraordinary nature of this hurricane-force firestorm.” The governor omits the fact that the Santa Ynez Reservoir, designed to supply Pacific Palisades, has a capacity of 118 million gallons, 40 times as much water as in those tanks. And the Santa Ynez Reservoir has been empty since last February to facilitate a minor repair of its cover, a job that can be done in a few weeks. Incompetence facilitates catastrophe.
Consider the perimeter reservoirs that are a critical node in the distribution network. These reservoirs store treated water pumped up from the Los Angeles basin, from treatment plants that rely on imported water from the State Water Project and the Colorado Aqueduct. Water from these reservoirs drains back down through water mains to serve foothill neighborhoods. These gravity-fed neighborhood systems also pressurize fire hydrants. There are three major reservoirs: Encino, built in 1921; Stone Canyon, built in 1924; and Hollywood, also built in 1924. Notice anything? These reservoirs are all over a century old. Even the Santa Ynez Reservoir, much smaller than the other three, was built 60 years ago, in 1965.
If the population of Los Angeles County has increased from about 2 million a century ago to more than 10 million people today, why has the state failed to construct more reservoirs in the Santa Monica Mountains? Governor Newsom and his supporters are right that wildfires often cannot be stopped. But if Los Angeles County had expanded its capacity to import, store, and distribute water at a pace even slightly proportional to the rate at which its population has grown, even these most challenging fires would be contained much sooner.
Governor Newsom and his fellow Golden State Democrats must answer for their legacy of mismanagement. California’s leaders should have recognized long ago the need to devote resources to clearing excess brush away from homes, instead of leaving in place an array of environmental restrictions that channeled time and money into the pockets of bureaucrats and consultants. At the same time, Newsom and his political allies should have recognized that building a system to deliver abundant water in an arid megacity is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. The fires that have burned out of control for many days now are grim proof.
Edward Ring is the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. He is also a senior fellow with the Center for American Greatness, and a regular contributor to the California Globe. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, National Review, City Journal, and other media outlets. Ring’s undergraduate degree is in Political Science from UC Davis, and he has an MBA in Finance from USC. Ring is the author of several books, including “Fixing California – Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism” (2021), “The Abundance Choice – Our Fight for More Water in California” (2022), and “Solutions – Innovative Public Policy for California” (2024).
