From The Daily Wire

ByEmily Zanotti @emzanotti

TRUMP WAS RIGHT: Jerry Brown Eased California Logging Rules Back In August

Months ago, California Gov. Jerry Brown urged state lawmakers to loosen restrictive logging regulations put in place to appease environmentalists — a move that appears to have confirmed that President Trump’s recent critiques of state logging practices was correct.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reported back in August that Brown was proposing one of the most significant changes to the state’s logging rules in nearly half a century.

“Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing broad new changes to California’s logging rules that would allow landowners to cut larger trees and build temporary roads without obtaining a permit as a way to thin more forests across the state,” the paper reported.

Environmentalists in California weren’t on board. They’ve been pushing for years to make California’s logging rules more restrictive, not less — but forest fires in recent years appeared to change the calculus for certain lawmakers.

“Under Brown’s proposal, private landowners would be able to cut trees up to 36 inches in diameter — up from the current 26 inches — on property 300 acres or less without getting a timber harvest permit from the state, as long as their purpose was to thin forests to reduce fire risk,” the Sentinel reported. “They also would be able to build roads of up to 600 feet long without getting a permit, as long as they repaired and replanted them.”

Forests, particularly in northern California, California lawmakers admitted, have become dangerously overgrown. But there’s currently little incentive for landowners to clear their trees — they are only allowed to clear dead and decaying wood and undergrowth and can’t clear healthy tress. By allowing landowners to recover some money from the process — letting them create and sell lumber, for instance — it could incentivize them to make bigger changes.

Environmentalists said they were worried landowners would go way too far, cutting down ancient redwoods or clear-cutting property, but even the most ardent environmentalists admit that some thinning is needed.

Despite his own embrace of new logging rules back in August, Gov. Jerry Brown balked at President Donald Trump’s suggestion that poor forestry and poor forest management might be to blame for the massive wildfires that ripped through northern and southern California earlier this month, claiming dozens of lives and tens of thousands of acres.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” the president tweeted while he was in France observing the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Read the full story here.