Look out for “hydroclimate whiplash” coming to a media website near you. That’s the term the climate left is suddenly using to explain the Los Angeles wildfires, or to put it more baldly, to change the subject from the failure of the state and local government to contain the fires that often accompany Santa Ana winds.
The theory is that climate change caused two especially wet winters in California in 2023 and 2024. This led to lush vegetation growth. Perhaps you recall the ebullient stories about the blooming desert and wildflower explosion. But in recent months, the theory goes, climate change has also caused a dry spell that has turned that vegetation into tinder for fires. Ergo, “hydroclimate whiplash.”
So climate change explains wet and dry seasons, which follows the progressive line that climate change is responsible for every natural disaster except for perhaps earthquakes. In today’s climate orthodoxy, bad weather is always man-made.
This ignores that California’s climate has long been variable with dry years following wet ones. The nearby chart from the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment shows precipitation in the state going back 130 or so years. There are wet and dry spells. The last couple of decades have had more dry years, but then so did the 1910s and 1920s when carbon emissions were far less than they are today.
The climate is changing, and human activity affects the climate. But variable rain and snowfall patterns in California are to be expected. Fires will occur as a result. Rather than blame the climate for wildfires, the obligation of public officials should be to prepare for them and, when they inevitably occur, mitigate the damage.
It’s on that score that Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Legislature in Sacramento, and the mayors of Los Angeles have failed. And, judging by the budget Mr. Newsom introduced on Friday, the Governor wants to keep on failing. His proposal skimps on wildfire prevention while boosting spending on Medicaid, green energy and payoffs to the teachers’ unions.
Phil Magness makes clear that Karl Marx was never an important economist. Three slices:
To [English professor Alex] Moskowitz, Marx is an epochal figure in the development of economic theory, and thus, it is “necessary” to understand the discipline’s history. To almost any competent historian of economic thought, however, Marx was never more than a peripheral figure in the economics profession.
One need not take my word for this assessment. The famous progressive economist John Maynard Keynes concurred. In 1925, Keynes visited the Soviet Union as part of a delegation of distinguished academics from the United Kingdom. He met with leading Marxist thinkers, including Leon Trotsky, who expressed hope that Keynes would steer Britain in a socialist direction. Keynes recorded a very different assessment of the Marxist economists he encountered upon his return to Cambridge. The Soviet economists, he wrote, had set up Marx’s Das Kapital as their “bible, above and beyond criticism.” To Keynes, however, Marx’s magnum opus was nothing more than “an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world.”
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In fact, most economist contemporaries of Marx did not even notice Das Kapital at the time of its publication or for many years later. When marginalist economist Philip Wicksteed happened upon it in 1884, he composed a withering “Jevonian” critique of Marx on account of its faulty theory of value. Additional problems in Marx’s system became apparent by the decade’s end, especially as it struggled to find a solution to the so-called “transformation problem.” Under Marx’s system, labor is operationalized as both an input of production and a priced good. This creates a mathematical circularity in practice, and Marx’s attempts to solve it in the posthumously published notes that became Volumes 2 and 3 of Das Kapital were generally regarded as unsatisfactory.
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Within the field of economics, Marx remains a non-entity for the simple reason that his theories have not withstood the scrutiny of other practitioners in the discipline. They not only failed the test of time—they never took hold among economists in the first place due to deficiencies in Marx’s system at its outset. When an English professor such as Moskovitz ventures far afield of his research competencies and declares that Marx was a preeminent figure in the history of economics, he only reveals his ideological biases while adding nothing of substance to the discipline he purports to critique.
Thomas Sowell and others state that the federal government owns 25% of the nation’s land (“The World’s Biggest Landlord Is Washington,” op-ed, Dec. 26). According to the Public Land Law Review Commission’s report in 1970, it owned one-third. So, there has been some progress.
In a letter to the editor (Jan. 7), Thomas Straka notes that much public land is “scrub desert” that would be difficult to sell. I pointed out in a 1998 book chapter that much of the poor quality is the result of the Interior Department’s multiple-use policy, which allows multiple ranchers to overgraze the land. Driving in the West, I could always identify whether the land’s ownership was private or public: One side of the fence was green and the other was wasteland. And it continues.
GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino warns that Trump’s proposed tariffs will inflict damage on the U.S. market for energy. Three slices:
Donald Trump’s promises of tariffs against Canada and Mexico would be harmful to the U.S. economy, upending numerous cross-border business relationships. Tariffs would violate the terms of the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) that Trump’s first administration negotiated and that Trump said was “the most important trade deal we’ve ever made by far.” And, unlike at any point in the past, they would affect U.S. energy markets.
Tariffs on our North American allies, if they truly will be on all products as Trump has promised, would affect about 70 percent of U.S. crude oil imports. Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta (Canada’s top oil-producing province), met with Trump and said she is not expecting any exemptions for the 25 percent tax on Canadian imports.
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Unlike in the past, when many U.S. energy imports came from the Middle East, the No. 1 source of imported crude oil today is Canada. By far. Almost 60 percent of U.S. crude oil imports in 2023 came from our northern neighbor.
Almost 70 percent of that Canadian oil goes to the Midwest, where it is processed in world-class refineries that employ thousands of Americans. The oil from the tar sands of Alberta is very difficult to refine because of its chemical makeup, and many U.S. refineries in the Midwest are specially built to handle it. Refining is one of America’s key energy strengths, and the sector is integrated with the global marketplace for oil and petroleum products. Refined products are shipped from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast for export.
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Aside from violating the USMCA, which Trump claims was one of his biggest accomplishments, 25 percent tariffs on all goods from Mexico and Canada would blow up years of progress toward an integrated North American energy market and invite retaliation by the No. 1 buyer of U.S. energy exports. It would not be a good start for an administration prioritizing U.S. energy production and security.
Pierre Lemieux ponders business people and international trade.
Michael Chapman is no fan of minimum-wage legislation. And nor is Eric Boehm.
Emma Camp reports that “41 percent of Chicago teachers were chronically absent last year.”
