Environmentalism, Not ‘Climate Change,’ Caused Explosion of Australia’s Bushfires

Jan. 13, 2020 (EIRNS)—The Australian Citizens Movement released two analyses of the current bushfire crisis in Australia’s southeast, which will be published in EIR. They show, as in America’s West, that massive “fuel loads” on brushland, the result of environmental bans on use and controlled burns, multiply fire danger over years leading to disaster. The analysis says in part:

The Volunteer Fire Fighters Association (VFFA) of New South Wales prominently displays on its website an article, “Green Ideology, Not Climate Change, Makes Bushfires Worse,” by Miranda Devine. Numerous articles on the VFFA website point to fire experts warning that fuel loads pose the real danger and that “it’s ridiculous to blame climate change.” Devine’s article reported a federal parliamentary inquiry into bushfires in 2003 which showed that a four-fold increase in ground fuel leads to a thirteen-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire.

The mainstream media mostly ignore these firefighters and has instead focused on the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, which is a front for the Anglo-American financial oligarchy’s World Wildlife Fund and its secretive 1001 Club of extremely rich donors.

Chairman Roger Underwood of Bushfire Front Inc. of Western Australia, on March 10, 2019, wrote to then-Environment Minister Melissa Price following her comments that the recent Victoria bushfires were “the result of climate change.” Such misinformed comments from the minister could not go unchallenged. Underwood has 40 years’ experience in bushfire management in Australia and overseas. He was General Manager of the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) in Western Australia. He wrote: “I implore you to withdraw your comments blaming the recent bushfires on climate change. They are unhelpful to Australian firefighters and disrespectful to Australian bushfire scientists and managers ... the very people who are putting their lives on the line to protect the Australian environment and communities.”

Raging bushfires sweeping through Australia were entirely predictable and the experts who forecast the crisis are in utter dismay that their warnings were ignored. Fuel loads are now about 10 times greater than existed under Aboriginal management at the time of British colonization. In April 1770, Captain James Cook described Australia as a “continent of smoke,” because Aboriginal tribes performed regular controlled burns, but now environmental laws prevent necessary controlled burns and land clearing, setting the stage for mega-infernos on hot windy days. In recent decades green ideology has seen forests locked up, fire trails grown over, and fuel loads explode as controlled burns are prevented under spurious green rationales.

Fire expert David Packham has explained that a 10-fold increase in fuel load means the fire will be 100 times more intense. It’s just basic physics and has nothing to do with whatever climate change may be occurring.

“It’s all preventable, this is the tragedy of it all,” VFFA Vice President Brian Williams told Jane Marwick on 2GB radio last week. “This fire has been building for the last 20 years. We’ve been burning, in N.S.W., less than 1% of our bushfire-prone land for the last 20 years. So that means every year, the fuel loads just continue to build. And they continue to build until we get a disaster like this.”