Kevin Kiley: “the best way to protect air quality is to stop catastrophic wildfires. This is a statement that should not be…”

“the best way to protect air quality is to stop catastrophic wildfires. This is a statement that should not be controversial and is one the truth of which we know all too well in California. For years in my State, the State piled on regulation after regulation after regulation, piled on new forms of litigation, new fuel blends, all things that raise the cost of living for people in our State. Yet, even more perversely, at the same time, they made it more difficult to proactively mitigate the risk of wildfire through active forest management. Let me tell you what the perverse result of that was. Between 2004 and 2020--this is a period of 16 years--you can aggregate all the emissions that were reduced through emission reduction policies in California--a period of 16 years leading up to the year 2020--take every single emission that was reduced as a result of State policy over those 16 years, and double that number of emissions were released into the atmosphere because of the fires that occurred just that year. All of the sacrifices Californians had made over the preceding 16 years were wiped out two times over because of these devastating wildfires that, of course, on top of the environmental damage that they inflicted, caused untold damage to life and property and our communities. The measure that we have before us today could not be more commonsensical.…”