Brown: Big fires, mudslides could become ‘very regular’
The horrific wildfires across California that killed 46 people last year, followed by the deadly mudslides near Santa Barbara this month, forecast the state’s future if the climate continues to warm at its present pace, Gov. Jerry Brown said Friday.
“What we saw in Santa Rosa and Napa and Santa Barbara, we don’t try to say what precise part of the causation came from climate change,” Brown said.
“But we do know that climate change is occurring, the temperature is rising and that droughts are more frequent and moisture is diminishing. The kind of thing we saw — fires followed by slides — that could become a very regular, recurring set of events.”
Brown spoke at UC Davis as part of a conference to mark the 50th anniversary of the California Air Resources Board. He noted that the air board, the most influential state air pollution regulator in the nation, was created by former Gov. Ronald Reagan.
He joked that he was recently reading Reagan’s final state-of-the-state address, delivered in January 1974, just before Brown took office in his first of four terms. In Reagan’s speech, which came during the Arab Oil Embargo, he asked all Californians to reduce their driving by 10 percent.
“Can you imagine a Republican governor telling his state’s citizens ‘we want you to drive 10 percent less?’” Brown joked. “Californians of course didn’t listen to that.”
Although the state’s motorists drove 335 billion miles last year — a distance that is 3,600 times farther than the distance from the Earth to the sun — Brown noted that the state’s air has gotten dramatically cleaner. Over the years, the air board has passed sweeping rules, sometimes to the ire of industry, which range from a phase-out of leaded gasoline to smog checks to tougher engine emissions standards on cars, trucks and factories.
“We’ve come a long way,” Brown said. “Smog was something that a lot of people in Los Angeles talked about. I can remember going as a young boy to Los Angeles. It was pretty darn hazy. You’d look up at the sky and it was yellow. You couldn’t see the mountains.”
The issue wasn’t partisan in the 1960s and 1970s, he noted. Reagan created the air board and President Richard Nixon, also a Republican, signed the Clean Air Act.
Today, the main issue is climate change, Brown said.
This week, NASA scientists reported that 2017 was the second hottest year globally since 1880, when modern temperature records first began. The planet was on average 1.62 degrees hotter than the 1951-1980 average. All 10 of the hottest years have occurred since 1998, and the hottest was 2016.
Calling climate change “an existential threat,” Brown said “it’s going to affect the economy and the well-being of the state.”
California has made good progress reducing smog, limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and expanding renewable energy, Brown said, but the challenge of the next generation will be to wean itself from fossil fuels entirely and strive for zero emissions, and even invent technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
“Where is humanity going?” Brown said. “Are we going to be able to have the wisdom and the skill to put ourselves in a position over the next 50 years to be better off than catastrophically worse off?”
“California is the epicenter and we can really make a difference.”