[Vision2020] 5-16-23 Union of Concerned Scientists: Ask a Scientist: Calling Out the Companies Responsible for Western Wildfires

[Ted Moffett]

Ask a scientist?  Really?  But don't some scientists promote "agenda driven
propaganda?"  The Union of Concerned Scientists article mentioned in
subject heading is lower down.  But first this astonishing unbelievable but
true story that involves the "agenda-driven propaganda" from some of a
scientific mind-set.
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plus 70 years, Ted Moffett.  Do not copy, forward, excerpt, or reproduce
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Opinion: Ham fleeced a town that gave him his Ark Encounter
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/2020/02/24/opinion-ham-fleeced-town-gave-him-his-ark-encounter/4831987002/

2-24-2020

Excerpt from article above:

In a Feb. 19 opinion in *The Enquirer*
<https://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/2020/02/19/opinion-ark-documentary-another-hatchet-job/4793491002/>,
Ham reacted harshly to the PBS premiere, calling it "an agenda-driven
propaganda piece" and claiming the directors had misrepresented their
intentions.
Among other storylines, the film follows the relationship between the Ark
Encounter and the city of Williamstown in Northern Kentucky, where the Ark
is located. Buoyed by promises from Ham and others that the "biblical theme
park" would bring a flood of tourism and prosperity, the city voted to sell
the Ark 100 acres of land for $1, while also giving them hundreds of
thousands in cash. The city also issued Ham’s company $62 million in
unsecured bonds and arranged for them to be repaid via diversion of tax
revenue. The film shows that the promised prosperity never materialized,
with Williamstown businesses shuttering.
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https://blog.ucsusa.org/elliott-negin/calling-out-the-companies-responsible-for-western-wildfires/

Excerpt from article above:

The US wildfire season used to last about four months, beginning in late
summer or early autumn. These days, it stretches
<https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/06/27/wildfires-all-seasons> six to
eight months, according to the US Forest Service, and in some places it’s
now a year-round affair.

In just five years, from 2018 through 2022, wildfires scorched 38.3 million
acres <https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10244/66> across
the country. That’s nearly 60,000 square miles, slightly bigger than the
state of Georgia. Last year alone, nearly 69,000
<https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10244/66> wildfires
burned 7.6 million
<https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10244/66> acres, more
than 40 percent of which were in Alaska.

Not only is the fire season longer, wildfires are burning larger areas more
severely and at higher elevations. The average acreage that has burned
every year since 2000—7 million
<https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10244/66>—is more than
double the annual average of 3.3 million
<https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10244/66> acres in the
1990s, even though the annual average of 70,025
<https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10244/66> wildfires a
year since 2000 is 12 percent less than in the 1990s.

There are a number of reasons why there has been so much more wildfire
destruction this century, particularly in the western United States and
Canadian southwest. Encroaching development in fire-prone areas and
widespread fire suppression are among them. But another major culprit is
climate change, which has intensified the heat and drought that have always
been factors in western North America.

That climate change obviously didn’t just happen on its own. It mainly
comes from burning fossil fuels, and a new Union of Concerned Scientists
(UCS) peer-reviewed study
<https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acbce8>—published on
May 16 by *Environmental Research Letters*—calculates just how much of the
acreage burned in forest fires in the western United States and
southwestern Canada can be attributed to the carbon emissions from the
world’s largest fossil fuel companies and cement manufacturers and their
products.
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