| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| by the scientific and technological evolution will make it inevitable, even for reasons of selfish analysis, will make it inevitable for people to take the right decisions. | ||
|
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And that is one of my hopes. | |
| The second hope is that the youth of today has a different perspective and a different vision of the world than the youth of our generations. | ||
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They are more cosmopolitan and they are more sensitive to the questions that are related to the well-being of our planet and the well-being of the international community. | |
| So there are silver linings. | ||
| I think that the question is not to be optimistic or pessimistic. | ||
| The question is to be determined. | ||
| We need to be determined in making the values and principles in which we believe win. | ||
| And if we are determined to fight for the right thing, if we are on the right side of history, I believe in the end we'll get what we want. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you so much, Mr. Secretary General. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined now by Representative Bruce Westerman. | ||
| He's a Republican of Arkansas and chair of the Natural Resources Committee. | ||
| Congressman, welcome to the program. | ||
|
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Good morning, Mimi. | |
| Good to be with you. | ||
| As I just said, you are the chair of the Natural Resources Committee. | ||
| Can you talk about your priorities in this Congress and your goals? | ||
|
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Well, we've got a lot of work to do in this Congress. | |
| And if you look at the jurisdiction of the Natural Resources Committee, a lot of that is energy and minerals. | ||
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So energy production and mining are going to be a huge part of the work that we do. | |
| But we also have jurisdiction over federal lands and forestry, over fisheries. | ||
| We also have Indian and Insular Affairs. | ||
| So we've got a full workload, not to mention California water and wildlife and fisheries. | ||
| So lots of things will be on our plate. | ||
| But we had a good run last Congress. | ||
| We got a lot of bills passed and signed into law. | ||
| We got the Explore Act, which is the country's first outdoor recreation bill. | ||
| And this was a large bipartisan bill that was so popular it passed out of committee unanimously. | ||
| It passed out of the House unanimously. | ||
| And then it passed the Senate unanimously and President Biden signed it into law. | ||
| So we're excited about outdoor recreation and access to public lands and meeting the growing needs of our country. | ||
| You are the only licensed forester in Congress. | ||
| I want to ask you about the wildfires in California, but what does that mean to be a licensed forester? | ||
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Well, I studied forestry in graduate school and there's actually a licensing process so you have to take an exam and do continuing education if you want to keep a license to practice forestry. | |
| I'm also, I did engineering for my undergraduate work and I'm a professional engineer and I've been able to keep those licenses up to speed while I'm here in Congress. | ||
| But it's kind of neat to, I think last Congress I was the only licensed professional engineer and the only forester in Congress. | ||
| I don't know why they say licensed forester. | ||
| I think I'm just quite simply the only forester, only person that studied forestry in Congress. | ||
| So can you talk about your views of the California wildfires and noting that President Trump has departed the White House and will be surveying damage there in California later today? | ||
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Well, these are obviously devastating if anybody's paid any attention to the news. | |
| You know, it's just heartbreaking to see over 15,000 homes destroyed, 28 lives lost. | ||
| And at last count, I think it was $250 billion of estimated damage. | ||
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And it's very tough conditions out there. | |
| I've spent time in Southern California. | ||
| I was out there in October flying over what was called the airport fire. | ||
| It didn't make near as much news because it didn't burn near as many homes. | ||
| You have these steep canyons with what are called forest, but it's really just chaparrill and kind of scrubby oak trees and brush. | ||
| It gets very dry, and you get these strong winds that come through. | ||
| And when these fires start, they're almost impossible to put out. | ||
| And, you know, fire traveling uphill is the when it burns the hottest. | ||
| If you think of a match and you strike it and hold it straight up, the flame's not very big, but if you point that flame down where it's running up the matchstick, you know, it'll burn your finger pretty quickly. | ||
| And that's kind of what happens when these fires are going up slope. | ||
| But when you look at the whole situation, there are things that we can do. | ||
| We know what happens when you get this dry fuel and wind and fires. | ||
| And we've got a lot of people living in what's called the wildland urban interface. | ||
| And it's where the forest meets the neighborhoods. | ||
| And those are the areas we really need to focus on to prevent the loss of life and property. | ||
| And the Fix Our Forest Act has provisions in it where we can create these defensible zones between the forest and the neighborhoods. | ||
| And Congressman, I do want to ask you about that Fix Our Forest bill, but going back to the wildfires, the mayor of Los Angeles and the Governor of California have come under considerable criticism for their response to the wildfires. | ||
| Do you think that criticism is appropriate? | ||
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Well, there's always going to be criticism of public officials when you have disasters like this. | |
| Some's appropriate and some's probably not. | ||
| When you look at the type of fire that they had, sure it started in the canyon. | ||
| There's things that could have been done to mitigate these situations so the fires didn't get as bad. | ||
| But once these fires got into the neighborhoods, we think of it as a wildfire, but it's really multiple house fires and they're trying to fight these house fires with conventional firefighting equipment and they just simply didn't have enough water or equipment or people there. | ||
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And where does that blame fall? | |
| I guess it has to come back on the public officials because it's their job to provide fire protection services and to make sure that those systems are up to speed and can handle whatever comes at them. | ||
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You know, when we think of the forest on fire, you think of tankers dropping water and dropping fire retardant and people parachuting out and fighting the fires. | |
| Well, you've got a combination of that going on. | ||
| And I think instead of blaming everyone, we need to look at it and figure out what we can do better to prevent these disasters going forward. | ||
| And Congressman Westerman, do you believe that climate change is increasing the frequency of wildfires and the intensity of wildfires? | ||
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Well, that's a question that gets asked a lot. | |
| And we certainly see times when we have drier conditions, hotter conditions. | ||
| But we also see that there are different places across the country that are experiencing the same conditions. | ||
| And the intensity and number of fires are not increasing in these places. | ||
| So regardless if it's climate change causing it or if it's weather conditions or poor management, we still have to ask the question, what are we going to do about it? | ||
| And if we know that the climate's warming and that these conditions are going to get worse, the science of forestry tells us how to manage these lands so that we have the proper amount of vegetation on the land. | ||
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And the big problem is we're getting these overstocked fuel loads. | |
| And when the fires happen, they're just catastrophic and you can't put them out. | ||
| They're so hot that they burn the organic matter out of the soil sometimes and you can't even get trees to grow back. | ||
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And it's an environmental travesty because we know that the forest fires put more carbon in the atmosphere. | |
| But they also, when you denude the land like that and the rains come along, which they eventually will in California, we're going to see tremendous soil erosion and mudslides and water quality issues. | ||
| So by keeping our forests healthy and intact, it adds all kinds of public safety features and environmental benefits. | ||
| And if you'd like to join our conversation with Congressman Bruce Westerman, you can do so on our lines by party. | ||
| Democrats 202748-8000, Republicans 202-748-8001, and Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can start calling in. | ||
| He's a Republican of Arkansas. | ||
| And Congressman, you were talking to us about the Fix Our Forests Acts that passed the House. | ||
| I'll put that up on the screen. | ||
| Give us a little bit more information about what that does and what you expect to happen in the Senate. | ||
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Well, first off, Mimi, this is a very bipartisan bill. | |
| I worked on it with my colleague, Democrat Scott Peters from the San Diego area. | ||
| Scott was an environmental lawyer, and he and I have been talking about forest health for several years now. | ||
| We first wrote a bill called the Save Our Sequoias Act because we've lost 20% of the giant sequoias on the planet due to wildfire. | ||
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And when you really look at the science of what's happened, it was because we've mismanaged those groves. | |
| But Scott and I worked together. | ||
| We got a lot of Democrat co-sponsors and actually passed this bill out of the House last fall, but we couldn't get any movement in the Senate. | ||
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And in light of these horrendous fires, we decided we can't stop. | |
| We got the bill back up and passed it out of the House yesterday with even more Democrat co-sponsors and more Democrat votes. | ||
| So I think the House has spoken and we need to get the Senate off-dead center to take this bill up and pass it as soon as possible so that President Trump can sign it and so that we can start doing the work. | ||
| It's going to take decades to get these areas back where they need to be. | ||
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And, you know, we've seen the loss of 15,000 homes. | |
| But if you look across the country, there are 44 million homes in the same condition in this wildland urban interface where these catastrophic wildfires can break out. | ||
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So there's a ton of work to do. | |
| We should have been doing this decades ago, but we need to get this bill passed so it can happen sooner. | ||
| Switching over to energy, Congressman, President Trump has declared a national energy emergency and he's expected to roll back regulations, promote more leasing on federal lands for drilling. | ||
| What do you think is the practical impact here of those actions? | ||
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Well, we need more energy is the practical impact and we need reliable and affordable energy and we need the cleanest energy possible. | |
| And the U.S. is really good at producing clean, affordable, and reliable energy. | ||
| If you just look at the numbers, we're seeing a growth in electrical consumption by about three times per year. | ||
| It used to be a half percent per year growth, and now it's at 1.5%. | ||
| It's projected to grow even more, and that electricity has to come from somewhere. | ||
| And there's been a lot of wind and solar built, but there's no way wind and solar can meet the growing demands of our country. | ||
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So I think the president's looking at an all-of-the-above energy approach, and I'm all for that. | |
| We've got a whole other issue with AI and data centers and the race on getting to the ASI, the super intelligence. | ||
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We're in a race with China on that, and China's not holding back on energy development. | |
| They built 40 gigawatts of coal-powered plants just last year. | ||
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To put that in perspective, that's a big coal-fired plant every week, and they're not even turning some of them on. | |
| I believe they're building these plants so that they can have the energy available when they get to the next iteration of AI. | ||
| Congressman, you mentioned that we need more energy, and I want to read to you a quote from the Natural Resources Defense Council's attorney who says, quote, there is a bit of a hypocrisy in declaring a domestic energy emergency while we flood international markets with fossil fuels. | ||
| We're the world's number one exporter of oil and gas, and we have an energy emergency. | ||
| What is this based on? | ||
| What's your reaction to that, sir? | ||
| Well, I think that's a short-sighted comment that's put out there to probably get some clickbait on their website. | ||
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But that's not looking at the whole energy picture. | |
| I talked about the growing demand for electricity. | ||
| We're shutting coal plants down here, and we need to be creating more baseload energy. | ||
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I'm all for clean energy, but we can't build nuclear power plants here. | |
| We can't, it takes forever to get permits to build facilities. | ||
| And also, we need to be exporting more energy because our allies around the world want it. | ||
| And when we're not exporting energy, that demand is being filled by countries like Russia and Iran and others that are not our friends. | ||
| And if you look at the two wars going on in Ukraine and with Hamas and Israel, Russia is funding their side of the war in Ukraine off of energy receipts, and Iran's funding these terrorist organizations off of energy receipts. | ||
| So it's not only just energy security and energy dominance, but it's also national security when you look at the global energy picture. | ||
| And the demand for energy globally is going up exponentially. | ||
| And you mentioned the competition with China. | ||
| I want to ask about electric vehicles. | ||
| Do you support the President's proposal to end the EV mandate and also the EV tax rebate for those that buy EVs that are manufactured in this country? | ||
|
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Absolutely. | |
| And if you look at the science on that, if we could convert every internal combustion engine in the United States to an EV overnight, it would have less than a 1% impact on greenhouse gas emissions. | ||
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And I like EVs. | |
| They're fun to drive. | ||
| It's great technology, but the technology should stand on its own. | ||
| We shouldn't be picking winners and losers and putting this false idea that it's going to save the world if everybody drives an EV when the numbers simply don't add up. | ||
| The U.S. produces about 13% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, but only 27% of that comes from all of transportation, and then 57% of that comes from light-duty trucks and passenger vehicles. | ||
| So you do the math and you're down to around 2% of the global greenhouse gas emissions are coming from U.S. light-duty trucks and passenger vehicles. | ||
| And then you find out that about 40% of our electricity comes from non-greenhouse gas emitting sources. | ||
| So again, if you could make every car an EV overnight, you've only decreased global greenhouse gas emissions less than 1%. | ||
| And it's a huge cost and inconvenience that's being put on the American consumer claiming to have these great climate benefits when really it doesn't. | ||
| And that 1% doesn't include the embedded carbon that it takes to do all the mining and build the components that go into an EV. | ||
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And again, I'm all for EV technology. | |
| Just let it stand on its own and don't require government mandate or government subsidy to make it work. | ||
| Let's talk to callers. | ||
| We've got a Republican in Canton, North Carolina. | ||
| Terry, good morning. | ||
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you, Representative, for your time. | ||
| My heart goes out for the people in California. | ||
| But here in West from North Carolina, we're still suffering. | ||
| I want to thank President Trump. | ||
| Promise made, promise kept. | ||
| If this is hard for me, give me a second. | ||
| My town was totally nearly devastated. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| They still have cadaver dogs running up and down the rivers looking for bodies. | ||
| My main question is, is there going to be an investigation into the Biden administration? | ||
| Was there geoengineering of Hawaii? | ||
| Was there cloud seeding to intensify this storm? | ||
| We know for a fact that FEMA's been into Caucas County, Tennessee, trying to buy up land. | ||
| I know they want the lithium deposits here. | ||
| People are suffering. | ||
| California, yes, has my heart, but they're the richest of the rich. | ||
| They are some of the poor out there. | ||
| I feel for them. | ||
| But Malibu and the Palestines ought to pay the millionaires ought to pay for their own. | ||
| All right, Terry. | ||
| Let's get you an answer on North Carolina. | ||
| Go ahead, Congressman. | ||
| Well, Kerry, first off, my heart goes out to you and everybody that's been affected by these natural disasters. | ||
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And I think you've reminded us that there's a real side to these disasters. | |
| People are suffering. | ||
| People are hurting. | ||
| And we move from one disaster to the next, and sometimes it seems like we forget the previous disaster. | ||
| I've had the opportunity to travel to places after these disasters and see the utter devastation. | ||
| And I know that when that's happening, people who are affected, they don't a lot of times care about the politics. | ||
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They're just trying to figure out how to get from one day to the next day and what the future is going to hold. | |
| So as far as investigations into the Biden administration on the response to the hurricanes, I don't know if that's going to happen. | ||
| That's not my committee of jurisdiction. | ||
| But I know that with Republicans in control, we're going to do a lot of oversight on all the areas where we have oversight of federal agencies. | ||
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And if there's credible evidence of things that need to be investigated, I'm sure that the appropriate committees will have those investigations. | |
| Mark in East Falmouth, Massachusetts, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
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Good morning, Congressman. | |
| With regards to California, The insurance companies pulled out of there over the past, from what we've heard on the news, over the past few years. | ||
| And then, of course, Florida insurance companies pulled out. | ||
| Now, obviously, these insurance companies knew about impending danger and the liabilities. | ||
| And is it worth going to the insurance companies and say they've already done all the work and just say, wait, you know, can you give us your stuff? | ||
| And then we can, you know, base our management based on that. | ||
| And also, Florida specifically, I mean, they must suck up about 50% of FEMA's budget. | ||
| And then just last year, the caller from Western North Carolina, Hurricane Helene, I think it was, that showed that, you know, areas on the coast aren't the only areas that are susceptible. | ||
| I mean, inland areas can be devastated too. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, you bring up a great point on the insurance companies. | ||
| And, you know, a few years back when the campfire happened up in Paradise, California, after the smoke cleared off of that and people were assessing the damages, | ||
| I started getting a lot of requests from insurance companies to talk about forest management and forest health because they were seeing the handwriting on the wall and the fact that these devastating fires were causing their insurance rates to go up to the extent that people wouldn't be able to afford to buy insurance. | ||
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And if you think an insurance company pulls out because they just don't want to be in a market, that's really not true. | |
| They want to sell as much insurance as they can. | ||
| But when their actuaries look at the risks that are involved and they say, okay, if you sell homeowners' insurance here, the price is going to be this. | ||
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And they look at it and realize nobody can afford the insurance. | |
| So they pull out as well. | ||
| So they're losing on top of homeowners not being able to insure their property. | ||
| When I was out in California in October, I did a town hall with Representative Young Kim, and we were talking to her constituents there in Orange County about this very issue. | ||
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And it's not just homeowners, it's realtors that are worried about the real estate markets collapsing because if you can't insure these very expensive homes, you're taking on so much risk that it creates huge problems. | |
| So this is the fires are devastating, the losses are devastating, but it's also created a huge problem with insurance. | ||
| And we're also seeing that all across the country where we're having these natural disasters. | ||
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And I think it will push us, the markets simply will push us to, when we rebuild, to build things that are more resilient for the conditions. | |
| I mean, if you look at building codes in hurricane areas, a lot of times you have to do things for higher wind conditions. | ||
| When we talk about building in the wildland urban interface, we should be looking at doing things like the government's firewise program suggests, where you have non-flammable roof material, where you have vents that always have covers on them, where you manage vegetation around the homes. | ||
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There's things we can do to be smarter about the way we build when we rebuild. | |
| Here's Jim in Grayson, Kentucky. | ||
| Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
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Sarah, I just wanted to, yes, you're not a lying, sir. | |
| I completely myself agree with Trump on the birthright issue. | ||
| Do you I guess he's asking about birthright citizenship ban? | ||
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Yep, not really a natural resources issue, but I believe this is one of the orders that President Trump has made, and he's fulfilling his campaign promises to secure the border and get our immigration system under control. | |
| Congressman, as you know, President Trump gave an interview to Sean Hannity yesterday and mentioned FEMA. | ||
| And he said this, this is according to Axios' reporting, that quote, he plans to have a quote whole big discussion very shortly on FEMA because he'd rather see the states take care of their own problems. | ||
| That's the interview from Wednesday evening. | ||
| What do you think of that? | ||
| Do you think that it should be the states that rebuild after a natural disaster? | ||
| Or should FEMA still have a role in that? | ||
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Well, I think FEMA will have a role, but I think that role could change and we could do things smarter than the way we're doing it right now. | |
| You know, FEMA goes back to the Stafford Act. | ||
| I'm also a member of the House Transportation Committee, which that's where the jurisdiction over FEMA lies. | ||
| And we have some really archaic rules in the Stafford Act that require you to do things like building something back exactly like it was before it was destroyed in the natural disaster. | ||
| And that gets to what I was talking about earlier, is how we have to be smarter about how we rebuild things. | ||
| So I don't see FEMA totally going away, but I could see where we have better partnerships with states and local communities so that we can work together on the specific needs in specific areas and create some flexibility and common sense so that we're building more resilient structures and built not building back. | ||
| I'm just thinking of an instance I heard about a home I think down in Houston where it had been wiped out three or four times by a flood and they just keep rebuilding it back in the same spot. | ||
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You see instances of things like that all across the country. | |
| So we've got to be smarter about how we do it and we've got to work more with the states on disaster relief. | ||
| One more call for you, Republican Lion Joe in Crofton, Maryland. | ||
| Hi Joe. | ||
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Hi, good morning. | |
| Didn't we used to do control burns in California, the dry grass and all that, and then there was something about a rat or a rodent that was endangered and then they stopped doing all those control burns, which when we did that, we didn't have so many wildfires. | ||
| Is that still going on? | ||
| Is there still we can't do the control burns because of the endangered desert rat? | ||
| Well, Joe, you're hitting right on the problem with forest management all across our country on federal lands. | ||
| And if you look at pre-Europeans in the United States, the Native Americans used fire as a tool, and they did it oftentimes because they wanted better hunting grounds. | ||
| And they knew that if they had fewer Widely spaced trees, larger trees, and that they burned, that they would get that early successional habitat coming up on the forest floor that makes great wildlife habitat. | ||
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And you would have fires all the time, but they would be low fires and low-intensity fires. | |
| And really, that's what forest management is: is you're working with nature to create a resilient system. | ||
| And control burning plays a huge role in that, but you can't control burn in areas where you've excluded fire for a century and it needs to be thinned first so that you're not getting these horrendous fires that are going to occur naturally or whenever you know arson or whatever, when the fire starts, it's just hard to put them out. | ||
| And the Endangered Species Act is one of the tools that has been used to stop forest management. | ||
| And we've got some very well-meaning laws that were put in place back in the 1970s that people have figured out how to abuse those laws to push their political agendas. |