Is It Climate Change's Fault?

politics than we are to our religion. We will change our religion to suit our politics, far more so than

the other way around. If you don't believe me, look at Joseph Biden, look at Nancy Pelosi, look at every Catholic liberal out there who you know one is not budging one inch from the Democratic Party platform when it comes to gay marriage, abortion, and yet is trying to present themselves as if they're, you know, a card carrying great old Catholic with nothing nothing amiss in their religious practice.

And it's not just them. I think it goes all the way from the level of someone who's a top level political operative like Nancy Pelosi, all the way down to John Q citizen. People are really prideful about their political views. It's you saying how you think the country should be ordered, and you kind of when you say something like that, you're putting yourself out there, and as a result, people dig in and they get prideful about it, and they get puffy about it, they get offend, they

get defensive about it. They get offended and defensive, and because there's so much pride in it, I think it politics is one of the few cases where you're willing to sit listen to someone who disagrees with you and say I was wrong and you were right. You know, there are very few things in life, very few big life things where someone is willing to sit and listen and say, yes, I used to think this, but I listened to you, and that convinced me that you were

right and I was wrong. Very few people have that kind of a one to eighty conversion on politics or religion. Usually it takes a long time to turn the Titanic around. It takes a long time for political attitudes to shift because it has to shift on an individual level for thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And this is part of why I sort of had this attitude of you know, there are a lot of Trump people. When you get real deep into deep hardcore Maga land deep

hardcore maga Facebook and Twitter posting. And I remember this during twenty twenty, all the Trump people like, we couldn't have a lot of big gatherings, I guess unless you were doing a Black Lives Matter protest, and so the Trump people would do these truck and car rallies. You just get a whole bunch of Trump people together and they drive their trucks or cars by and have American flags and Trump flags flying from the back of them.

And there was a big rally like that somewhere in Orange County, I think, somewhere in California, and Trump people were like, Trump's gonna win in California. Oh well, if you didn't cheat, he definitely win California. California would be so much twich. And I'm looking at this, I'm like, Donald Trump's not gonna win California. And I think people ask me, what's gonna happen, what's gonna take whin or

when is California gonna wake up? And I always kept trying to retort to people, it's not it's not going to. It's not going to. People are dead set in thinking this is better it is better that there there are a ton of people who vote for whom the big problems of California don't impact them that much. Homelessness is bad, but if you live in a really posh neighborhood in Pacific Palisades, it's really not impacting your day to day all that much. Taxes are bad, but if you're already

a multi millionaire, maybe you just don't care. Housing costs are bad, but if you've already owned, you already own your house, what do you care about? High housing prizes just means the value of your home is going up. Yeah, there are a lot of problems with California, and there are also you know, oh, taxes are high. Well, IM a lowering com person. I don't pay much taxes anyway. There are a lot of people who have, because of where they are in society, either don't care or don't

allow themselves to connect the dots that. Hey, Democrat policies are bad and are making life worse, and there are way too many people like that. I think there are. There is an army of millennial to gen z women who are gonna vote for Democrats eighty five to fifteen every election for a long long, long time, and they're just gonna do that because they think that there's some

kind of moral superiority to do in that. And this is the first election when millennial and zuomer men sort of woke up and were like, I don't know that there's anything morally superior about voting for Democrats. And there's this massive new gender divide on politics between young men and young women, which is kind of fascinating to see.

But in California, I just think the dynamics of generation after generation after generation pumped out by liberal California public schools and too many people for whom the problems of California just aren't impacting them, and they're the ones staying. They're not the ones fleeing to Idaho, They're the ones staying. This brings me to the wildfires in Los Angeles. I am sure that there are tens of thousands of people who have been impacted by the wildfires or are family

members of people directly impacted. That that probably extends into the hundreds of thousands of people by the wildfires who voted for Kamala Harris and two years before that voted for Gavin Newsom, and two years before that voted for Joe Biden in two years before that, voted for Gavin Newsom and voted for Gavin Newsom and vot and voted for Jerry Brown and voted for Hillary Clinton and voted

and have just consistent Democrat voting track record. I am sure there are tens of thousands of people like that who have lost their homes or a family member lost their homes. I've been saying on this show, and what's going to take for California to wake up? What's going to take to change things? My response has always been,

you can't think of California politics this way. It's taken us thirty years to slide to where we are now, with the Republican Party being absolutely dead, with Democrats having this massive super duper majority. It's gonna take a long time for Republicans to build back up to being competitive again. This is not something that you're gonna snap your fingers overnight.

This is a twenty year project. That's what I've repeatedly been saying that there's no I just don't believe there's a silver bullet that's gonna restore We got to bring California back. What do you mean bring California back. The state is so screwed up on so many fronts in so many different ways. Even a good governor couldn't change everything overnight. Not when Democrats control literally three quarters of

the state legislature. I'm not exaggerating, three quarters of the state Legislature, of the eighty seats in the California State Assembly, thirty of the forty seats in the state Senate, in fact, in fact, I think it's slightly more than those numbers. One governor's not going to change everything now when they have six of the seven seats on the California State Supreme Court. Not when they have all of these appointees all over the place on entities like the California Air

Resources Board. That thing wields unbelievable power. I don't think you can replace everybody overnight. I don't think a new governor can replace everybody overnight. But boy, if there's any one thing that could be a catalyst to change people's minds, because it has to involve individual people's minds changing people changing their minds on their owns. Why I started by talking about the pride that people have in their politics. People don't change their politics. People are stubborn as heck

about them. They're prideful about them that they're they dig in. My pastor and I was we were talking about this, how even we notice sometimes among certain Catholics that they're more there, even Catholics who are like pro life, but in certain cases that it's almost like they're more tied to the Republican Party to being anti woke than they

aren't necessarily to being Catholic people. People are so dug into their politics, but if there's anything that could really change your mind, it's your house burning down, or your dear friend's house burning down, your brother in law's house burning down, and your sister and your nieces and nephews scrambling and needing a home, needing to stay with you

for a month. It's seeing that some reservoir it had to be covered and then they had to drain a reservoir and they never refilled the reservoir because of environmental loans. It's seeing a mayor who's clearly incompetent, who said that she wasn't going to be traveling doing foreign travel to Africa, and then of course was doing foreign travel to Africa. It's a mayor who's you know a bunch of liberals who are screaming and yelling, well, we can't be pointing

the fingers right now. Meanwhile, the mayor is firing the fire chief because the fire chief said, hey, we don't have water. The fire chief whose main priority the fired fire chief, by the way, who said one of her main priorities was making sure that DEI is enforced within the fire department. You know, the fire department that's putting forward female officers to say, well, people, when they get firefighters coming for emergency response, they want someone who looks

like them. If you're a if I can't lift your husband, then well sorry. And what can the Democrats say? I mean, what possible excuse can the Democrats give for this situation when insurance companies were telling people, we can't ensure these houses. The fire risk here is too extreme, it's too deadly. Certain kinds of forests managed certain kinds of ways by certain kinds of entities, like so Southern California, Edison that did thinning, that did all kinds of fire breaks, all

kinds of stuff. Those are fine. But the constant push from the environmental left, the Sierra Club left, that which was basically of push that Gavin Newsom has to listen to. He has to give some credence to was never cut anything down, don't ever cut anything down, don't the forest floors, don't do anything, don't drive a truck into a forest. Ever. That's their forestrym management strategy for much of the left, and for the activist left, that's their forest stream management strategy.

And the political left has to placate that movement somewhat. They didn't do everything they wanted, but they had to listen to him somewhat. There's a strain of folks on the left who are sort of trying to be like, now is not the time for pointing fingers, and they're immediately looking for someone to point fingers at Gavin. You know, Gavin Newsom doesn't want to hear anyone pointing a finger at him, but he's writing, Left, we need to get

to the bottom of who's responsible for this. You You've been the governor for six years. You've had Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature your whole time in office. You appointed people to the California Air Resources Board. You it's you and the Democrats had full control of everything for the eight years prior to you. Okay, don't point fingers. One party has been completely in charge of everything in La City government, La County government, California state government for at

least fourteen years. It's all them. And this gets me back to the individual John Q. Voter. Is this the moment where John Q. Voter looks around at his house that burned down, His house that had a Kamala Harris yard sign in it, that had a Gavenue sign Newsom sign in it two years prior, that had a Joe Biden sign in it, two years prior, that had another Gaven Newsom sign in it, that had a no on Gaven Neuwso recall sign in it. Does he look at his yard that's now burned down and say, I don't

think I'm voting for these people again. There is going to be more than zero people like that. I'll guarantee that. I'll guarantee the numbers more than zero. Where this colossal failure of providing this one basic service firefighting forestream management, which leads me to my next question, what problem did

Gavin Newsom encounter that he has actually made better? Next on the John Girardi Show, what were the problems California was experiencing when Gavin Newsom became the governor in January of twenty nineteen, and what are the problems we are experiencing today? Six years on? Homelessness was starting to be a pretty bad problem. It's worse by every metric, it's worse, more homeless people, and we have spent tens of billions of dollars on it, and it's not better. Housing availability

was a problem in twenty nineteen. Housing was too expensive. It was too expensive to build. It was too expensive for builders to build anything other than In many markets, much of the time, too expensive to build anything other than high end housing or California registered trademark low income housing and low income housing often lost exorbitantly high prices to build and could only be built because of government subsidies. This unsustainable model where the only way to build it

is through government subsidy. Newsom came in in twenty nineteen talking about how we need to have more homes, we need to have more housing construction, we need more, we need Have we improved, No, there's been no improvement. The Dallas metro area of Texas builds more homes annually than all of California, all of the key constraints that limit our ability to build and sequa worst of all, they're

still there. We have a huge shutdown of all kinds of building construction projects here in Fresno because of one stupid sequel lawsuit against the city. One stupid sequel lawsuit that brought in the city's entire environmental and development plan that all these different businesses were relying on to help them build, including building new housing. All of it shut down because one left wing nonprofit filed One left wing nonprofit filed a lawsuit that was it. That's how sequel works,

the California Environmental Quality Act. We have really high taxes. We still have really high taxes. We had budgetary problems. We still have budgetary problems. We have some of the highest unemployment in the country. We have the highest gas prices in the country. We have really high energy costs. All by the way, in the gas and energy costs, everyone knows why. We know why. Because California has much

higher emission standards than everywhere else in the country. We have to set up separate refinery systems just for our gasoline. Because we have our specific blend of California gas. So we're a gas island. You know, the same gas that they sell in Nevada or Arizona wherever, they can't sell it in California because California has special regulations. And what does Gavin Newsom try to argue, Well, he's arguing that the gas companies are greedy and are price gouging. That's

why the prices are high. He knows that's not why the prices are high. Everyone understands why energy costs in California are expensive. Oh, we're trying to get rid of natural gat We're moving to a situation where we're going to have no nothing but green energy production in this state, but no nuclear. We constantly want to shut down the L Diablo nuclear plant until we realize that we're not going to have any any power without it. We don't want any nuclear in spite of the fact that it's

zero emissions in the atmosphere. You know, the only thing you can say about nuclear about nuclears, what are you going to do with nuclear waste? Which I would respond, what are you going to do with the batteries that are done from your solar panels? What do you do with the batteries you can't recycle them, what do you

do with the batteries? So Newsom's grand plan is to build a whole solar power industry that does not exist in this state, a whole offshore solar power production infrastructure that does not exist anyway anyway, Needless to say, another problem that hasn't been solved and completely bat bleep unrealistic

goals that we know we're never going to achieve. There are a lot of people in California who are able to who live complacently ignore the fact that Gavin Newsom hasn't made any of those things better, and still line up and vote for Democrats. That's what people did this year in California, although Republicans did better than they normally do,

at least in the presidential election. Certainly there are people who are able to be complacent about all these problems that never get better and never resolve themselves, and they still vote Democrat because housing costs their high but they already own their home, doesn't impact them. Homelessness is a big problem, but maybe not in their neighborhood. It's not that big of a deal. It's only when they go to the downtown part of the city. Yeah, whatever energy

costs or high Yeah, I already made my money. I'll be all right. I sort of calculated that into my budget. It's just an annoying nuisance. You just don't make the connection that the government has anything to do with it, that the people you elect have anything to do with it.

At some point though, you know, as I said, there was certainly at least one house burnt down in this fire, in these fires, maybe in the Palisades fire, at least one house burned down that had a Kamala Harris for President's sign in it, that had had before that a Gavenusom for Governor's sign in it, that before that had a Joe Biden for President sign in it, that before that had had another Gavenuissem sign in it, that before that had had a No on the Gaven Newsom recall

sign in it, and before that had had a Hillary Clinton sign in it. Certainly a house with those yard signs burned down, and the owner has got to be standing there and thinking to him or herself, did these people fail me? Did this governor fail me? Did this political party fail me? This political party that led me to support Democrat politicians in the city of La, County of La, and statewide throughout California. Maybe I think differently

next time I pull that lever. Maybe I think, if anything could be a catalyst for change, maybe this is it. When we return the convenient excuse of climate change. Next on the John Girardi Show, What were the causes of the Roman Civil War that pitted Julius Caesar against Pompey. Well, the cause one could on one level, one could say the cause was Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon River, violating the office given to him. He crossed the Rubicon River at the head of an army that violated Roman law.

Roman law said, nope, if you're a commander, if you're a proconsul with military command in this region, if you leave that regent at the head of your army, you've broken the law. You're marching on Rome with an army behind you. You violated the law. You've started a rebellion. That was the immediate cause of that civil war. But

what was the real cause. The real causes were the dysfunction of the Roman Republic, the changing of how Roman militaries viewed their allegiances, Roman legions or individual units of the Roman military viewed their allegiance changes that had been introduced in the prior generation, as far as the ability of extremely wealthy men who got appointed to different proconsular positions to help directly fund and pay for soldiers and

their equipment and their pay themselves, which resulted in soldiers having more of an allegiance to their generals than they did to the Roman state. So if Julius Caesar, your guy that you've campaigned with, who's put bread on your table, says hey, boys, we're crossing the rubicon here, we're going to go. We're going to go take Rome. Hell. Yeah.

And a lot of dysfunction within the Roman state of senators not wanting any one individual man to take credit for good things, petty jealousies towards Julius Caesar, a culture of law fair basically prosecuting people. Basically the way the Roman legal system worked, you could have private people could prosecute you for capital crimes, for criminal crimes. It wasn't the state that prosecuted for crimes. An individual would bring

a charge against you. And Julius Caesar knew if he came back to Rome, not at the head of his army with his weapons put down just coming back as a citizen, he'd immediately be subject to lawsuits for decisions he made when he was consul in about a decade prior. And basically the Roman Republican system was flood. That was

the actual cause of the Roman Civil War. I feel like blaming the fires on quote climate change is a way of sort of it's an amazing way to sort of disclaim any responsibility and just to vaguely put it the responsibility for the fires on the shoulders of vague, faceless, nameless, shapeless, anonymous conservatives in California who somehow apparently are stopping us from achieving the environmental utopia that we all really desperately want.

If only Yeah, if it weren't for climate change, if it weren't for climate change, these firefires, these forest fires, wouldn't have happened. These forest fires are happening because of climate change. Climate change. Also, the term is so vague climate change. It doesn't even mean hotter temperatures, because lest you all forget, this is happening in January, it's not because it's hot. Well, climate change happened, which led to less rain, led to a dry rain year. I mean,

I thought, so is it less rain happens. Now, this is the fun thing about climate change is that any bad thing that happens you can blame on climate change. If you have more hurricanes and too much rain, whoa climate change? If you have a dry year, not enough rain, Hey, climate change. The climate's always changing. And it's sort of a way for Democrats who have run this state completely, no holds barred, for fourteen years, and who've run Los

Angeles for longer than that. It's this great way for liberals to disclaim any individual responsibility, for any one politician to disclaim responsibility, any one political party to disclaim responsibility. It's climate change. And you know who is pro climate change? Or conservatives? Conservatives who have last I checked, not run anything in California since Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. And this is the infuriating thing with people. A little climate change,

You know, you have to look at climate change. Well, if climate change is so bad that it leaves us vulnerable to forest fires like this, yes, let's just take that for the sake of argument. There's some evidence that average temperatures have crept up one or two degrees, you know, two degrees or so over the last one hundred years.

Let's just take that as a given. Doesn't that put even more of an onus on responsible environmentalists people concern with the environment, given that climate change is here and that I don't know that climate change gets resolved by just California doing stuff. I mean, there's federal policy that the state of California can control. There's international business and policies that California simply cannot control. We have no ability to control what the Chinese do and how they pollute.

We have no ability to control India and now it pollutes, or Russia now it pollutes, or anywhere. Given that climate change is a thing, if you accept that as a given, it puts an even greater onus on you to be prepared. The forests aren't going away, climate change isn't getting reversed.

Even if you completely were to reform the entire state of californiash reshape the entire economy and culture around your green future, which you know you can't do in a general in ten years, in twenty years, you know you can't really do it. It puts more of an onus on you to have forest effective forestry management, to limit fires, not less. It puts more of an onus for you

to have water storage systems, not less. It has more of an onus on you to do the kinds of effective things that have worked for the Force managed by Southern California Edison, like clearing clearing ground, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's more of an onus, not less saying that, oh, what started the Civil War? Well, it was it was the South was concerned with states rights. No, it was slavery. Well, but it was the Southern states were well, they were

trying to stick up for their rights. Yeah, their right to have slaves, their right to have state laws that allowed them to have slaves. Slavery was a major issue. It was a major issue. There were other issues too, but that was a major overriding issue. Don't just I mean, it's it's the ultimate, don't you know, urinate on my boot and tell me it's raining situation you want to blame. You cannot just say climate change and say that that's

the reason the forest fires happened. No, especially given that twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, we had horrible forest fires in this state. We just lucked out that they didn't happen near the second biggest metro population area in the country. We had massive, horrible forest fires that resulted in horrific environmental damage. And that's the thing that just drives me nuts. There's no sense the radical environmental left in this state

that they cannot bear. They cannot fathom the idea of a limited sacrifice for the sake of a long term gain. They look at the idea of controlled burns, fire breaks, thinning forests, these small environmental harms to prevent larger environmental harms. They look at that with horror. They think it's they seem to think it's the equivalent of like, look if we're talking about doing that with human lives, like I'm not going to murder five humans to prevent one hundred

humans from dying or something. That's an unacceptable solution to do genuine evil. We're not talking about absolute negative prohibitions of the moral law. Trees are not people making some kind of limited sacrifice by thinning forest floors, controlled burns,

et cetera to forestall. I mean some of the horrible forest fires we had in twenty twenty, people were able to estimate it undid in one fire all of the environmental programs California has ever done in it history, the carbon offset basically of all of the environmental programs California has ever done in its history was basically offset undone by one horrible fire. One fire. I don't know if this fire is gonna be a similar effect, But this idea that no, we just say, oh well, well, who's

to blame? Arsonists? Arsonists not afraid of criminal punishment because California has been so lax on criminal punishments. Was it, you know? Was it Mayor Karen Bass not managing the water situation appropriately being in Ghana when she knew there was high risk of fires? Was it the fire department being too focused on DEI rather than firefighting? Was it Gavin Newsom? Was it the state legislature? Was it the

air resources? But was it California's inability in spite of twenty fourteen prop one to actually build any water storage facilities to deal with the fires, to actually build any of the water storage facilities? The Californians agreed we should build and set aside billions of dollars to build. Whose fault is it, Oh, well, let's it's climate change. Climate

change is the main culprit. Oh, so then no one's responsible is a great way of the people who are responsible for the problem being able to say and pretend like they're not the ones responsible. It's utterly infuriating. So yeah, I'm I'm going to be that guy who's not gonna I mean, I think firefighters are amazing. I think firefighters are heroic. I think so many of them have done amazing things. They've done incredible stuff. There's been a lot of local firefighters have gone down to LA to help

fight the fires. God bless every single one of them. Hope they all come back safe and they're doing great work. But at a certain point you got to start asking, like, at a certain point, focusing just on the heroics of the firefighters is an avoidance strategy. It's a way to avoid the politically highly distasteful reality that the one side that's run this state for fourteen years has done a

terrible job. When we return Gavin Newsom's Lululemon jacket that he keeps wearing next on The John Girardi Show, I've always noticed that Gavin Newsom is dressed to the nines, and I always notice he has this one particular kind of looks like a quarter zip jacket kind of thing

that he wears whenever he's rough in it. So if he's out like for seeing another horrible forest fire that's devastated his state because he doesn't actually insist on effective forestry management, or when he's going to a homeless encampment that's getting cleaned up that he hadn't done anything really to help with that problem, either over the course of his time as governor or whatever he's doing. Whenever he's

roughing it, he tends to wear this. Or he goes to pretend laid down the first rail for the high speed rail system that'll never get built that he keeps insisting we've pour money into, he tends to wear this one jacket. I sort of noticed it, and I mentioned it to my wife just says that I read a story about that. This is a piece from January eleventh of twenty twenty three, two years ago when from SF GAIT.

When California Governor Gavin Newsom appeared in front of the news media to discuss his proposals for the new state budget Monday, he was wearing one of the several custom garments that have become one of his hallmarks since he first took office approximately four years ago. A navy blue jacket with a white bear embroidered on the left breast Alex Moffatt, the actor from Saturday Night Live, or a similar one when he played the governor on Saturday Night Live.

This is, in fact a custom made Lulu Lemon jacket. So he's got a custom Lulu Lemon jacket for when he's surveying the wreckage of the state. That'll do it. Johns already show see you next time on Power Talk.