Kennedy and Climate Change

The long-obscured relevance of habitat preservation and land management

In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, RFK, Jr. remarked:

I have a personal belief that the climate crisis is real. I do not insist that anybody else share my belief. The carbon orthodoxy and the people who subscribe to it get it wrong. There actually are a lot more important things than carbon and carbon sequestration. There’s habitat preservation – the most important thing we can do. We’ve forgotten completely about that because of the obsession with reducing carbon.

In an August 14 interview with Ed Dowd about the Maui fires, Kennedy did not follow the fashion of immediately jumping to the issue of climate change.

Instead, he asked Dowd (a Maui resident) specific questions about land management, local weather conditions, what caused the fire’s ignition, and the proper maintenance of electrical power lines. As Kennedy noted in the interview, he has successfully sued California utility companies for their failure to take adequate safety measures for preventing power lines from causing fires, especially in the event of high winds. Ed Dowd mentioned that high winds knocked down power lines, which could have been the cause of multiple points of ignition. He also pointed out the Maui has experienced multiple documented cases of arson in recent years. During my visit to Lahaina today, I took the following video on the Lahaina Bypass, which gently arcs to the east and up the hill from the old town. Note that there are no power lines along the area where the fire apparently began on the southeast approach to town. This suggests that the initial point of ignition was arson. With wind blowing up to 80 miles per hour in the afternoon, the fire quickly reached a gas station and wooden structures on the south side of town, at which point it turned into a full-blown firestorm.

Though I’m a lifelong environmentalist—I founded a high school environmental club in 1986 and worked for Greenpeace when I was in college—I have long been skeptical of several tenets of what Kennedy calls “carbon orthodoxy.”

Even if we accept the (highly questionable) claim that carbon dioxide emissions from human activity are the primary cause of climate change, it seems to me that few if any of the orthodox remedies proposed are practical or effective, and nor are their purported benefits measurable.

While carbon orthodoxy is primarily concerned with reducing emissions from fossil fuel combustion, this obsession largely ignores the huge issue of land and forest management. As The Los Angeles Times reported on October 20, 2022, “A single, devastating California fire season wiped out years of efforts to cut emissions.”

A nearly two-decade effort by Californians to cut their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide may have been erased by a single, devastating year of wildfires, according to UCLA and University of Chicago researchers. The state’s record-breaking 2020 fire season, which saw more than 4 million acres burn, spewed almost twice the tonnage of greenhouse gases as the total amount of carbon dioxide reductions made since 2003, according to a study published recently in the journal Environmental Pollution.

Researchers estimated that about 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent were released by the fires, compared with about 65 million metric tons of reductions achieved in the previous 18 years. “When we look at the contribution of the 2020 wildfires, it becomes almost like a new sector of emissions in the economy,” said Michael Jerrett, a professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and a lead author of the research. “Really, we’re about double the reductions.”

Upon reading this report, many adherents to carbon orthodoxy are reflexively inclined to lament climate change. This reaction ignores three salient facts:

1). Intermittent drought, including multi-year drought, has always afflicted certain regions of the world such as the American West. Severe droughts in California were recorded by Spanish and Anglo-American settlers in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. These witness testimonies have been corroborated by tree ring studies.

2). There is now a broad consensus that forests in California and throughout the American West have been terribly mismanaged for over a century, allowing gross tree overcrowding and vast piles of fuel to pile up. Even researchers who emphasize the role of climate change concede this. Like it or not, human settlement in and around forested areas is a significant reality. Forests, like gardens, must be managed. Native American tribes recognized this, and they practiced controlled burning to create meadows for game. A properly managed timber industry can remove dense stands of dead, beetle-killed trees and undergrowth that act as kindling. Moreover, young, rapidly growing trees (planted by the timber industry for eventual harvest) remove vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, as the carbon is converted to wood. The recent documentary film, American Forest Fires: The Untold Story (see TRAILER), provides a detailed exposition of this oft-ignored reality.

3). Even if human-induced climate change is contributing to forest fires, this doesn’t change the fact that the failure to manage forests is releasing far more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from forest fires than is being reduced by other measures.

Dreadful forestry management in the United States is just one element of poor land use and habitat destruction that can and should be corrected. While adherents to carbon orthodoxy often advocate for wind farms, electric cars, and carbon credit trading, it is very difficult if not impossible to measure the environmental benefit of these commercial enterprises. While huge investments are made in these industries, relatively little is invested in preserving tropical rain forests in places like Malaysia and Indonesia, where huge tracts of rainforest are burned to make way for palm oil plantations. The wealthy, industrialized nations of the world should invest far more to incentive tropical nations to preserve their habitat.

Another catastrophically wasteful and polluting practice—a practice that produces a gigantic carbon footprint—is the widespread consumption of bottled water. Water weighs one ton per cubic meter. Every year, millions of tons of bottled water are shipped all over the world (over distances as far as Fiji to New York) by ocean-going vessels and aircraft (burning diesel and kerosene). Billions of plastic bottles are produced (out of petroleum), used one time, and then end up in landfills, rivers, oceans, and on beaches. Even in cities that enjoy reservoirs of superb drinking water, millions of people consume water out of plastic bottles instead of drawing it from the tap. To assuage anxieties about municipal water and waterpipe quality, far more could be invested in community and household testing and filtration.

Finally, it seems to me that Kennedy and all sensible people who care about the environment should consider the value of nuclear energy. With substantial investment in reactor safety technology and proper power plant siting—i.e., not in known tsunami zones—new nuclear power plants could produce great quantities of power with zero emissions and a tiny fraction of the footprint of a large wind or solar farm.