Mr. Newsom’s Maddening Eco-Bureaucracy Allows More Communities to Burn to the Ground

Responding to: What Will It Take for California Pols to Reduce Fire Risk? — James Freeman · 2026-06-10

What the Piece Argues

James Freeman’s Wall Street Journal column pins California’s worsening wildfire crisis not on climate change or corporate negligence but on state environmental rules. He frames Governor Newsom’s post‑fire rebuilding pledges as empty, citing the paltry number of rebuilt homes, and presents bureaucratic obstacles—CEQA reviews, “cultural monitoring” (tribal consultations), and “eco‑bureaucracy”—as the barriers preventing aggressive forest management and fuel reduction. The piece treats this regulatory tangle as a self‑evident catastrophe that the state’s Democratic politicians refuse to fix, warning that without deregulation, more communities will burn.

Receipts

The column takes a real, slow‑moving disaster and pins the blame on a decoy so familiar it barely draws a second glance: red tape. Here’s the con and what’s actually happening.

The framing wants you to believe

• California’s wildfires are fueled chiefly by paperwork—environmental reviews, tribal consultations, and bureaucratic inertia block the clearing, thinning, and prescribed burns that would save lives.
• The state’s refusal to gut these rules is a political choice that is knowingly letting communities burn.

What’s really going on

• The primary driver of the extreme fire behavior California now endures is a hotter, drier climate: the state’s own Fourth Climate Change Assessment found that climate change has already doubled the area burned since the 1970s, and Cal Fire’s 2022 Strategic Fire Plan identifies rising temperatures and drought as the dominant accelerant, not a lack of chain saws.
• The “cultural monitoring” Freeman sneers at is the legally required consultation with Native tribes, whose traditional land‑management practices—including controlled burns—are precisely the kind of “aggressive landscape management” that actually reduces fire risk; mocking that requirement while decrying the lack of prescribed fire is a self‑refuting dodge.
• The real beneficiary of the deregulatory narrative is a constellation of fossil‑fuel companies (who profit from continued emissions), timber interests (who want to log under the cover of “fuel reduction”), and developers (who seek to build in high‑fire‑hazard zones without costly safety standards), all of whom share an incentive to change the subject from the climate‑driven reality of megafires.
• The column omits that California utilities’ wildfire liability is already statutorily capped at ratepayer‑funded pools, which is the actual mechanism subsidizing the continued defensible‑space neglect that Freeman attributes to bureaucracy.

(Anchor: California Fourth Climate Change Assessment, 2018; Cal Fire, “2022 Strategic Fire Plan for California”; U.S. Forest Service, “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis,” 2022.)

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: at a family dinner where a well‑meaning relative genuinely believes the Journal column nailed the problem.

Maria’s house in Altadena was reduced to ash and twisted rebar in an afternoon. She still has the photograph of her grandfather in front of the house when it was built in 1947, the one thing she grabbed. The Journal’s James Freeman says she is waiting on a rebuild today because California’s “maddening eco‑bureaucracy” has gummed up the works. That story feels true when you are staring at a blackened hole where a home used to be. But the deeper truth—the one firefighters, tribal leaders, and the state’s own climate scientists keep repeating—is that the furnace that ate Altadena was supercharged by heat and drought that no permit‑fast‑tracking can reverse. Cal Fire’s own scientists have found that the fire season has lengthened dramatically — by one estimate, as much as 75 days — because of a warming climate, not because a planner didn’t stamp a document fast enough. We agree that a government that fails to protect its people has forfeited its reason for existing. But the failure is not too much regulation; it is regulatory capture of a different kind—the decades‑long refusal, cheered on by the same editorial page, to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for the carbon they knew, since at least 1977, would cook the forests. The people who actually want to stop the next Altadena support science‑based forest management, including prescribed burns at the scale the state is now funding, and they demand that the industries whose product made every recent fire demonstrably worse pay their share of the cost. That is not bureaucracy. That is justice.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: in a letter to the editor or a direct reply to a colleague who forwarded the piece in good faith.

Freeman’s column is built on one load‑bearing plank: that if California would only sweep away its environmental rules, the state could thin more trees, burn more brush, and rebuild faster, and therefore lives would be saved. It is a satisfying story, and it is almost completely wrong in the place where wrongness kills. The U.S. Forest Service’s own “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis” strategy, published in 2022, identifies the primary obstacle to fuel treatment not as the National Environmental Policy Act or its state equivalent, but as a chronic shortage of trained personnel, insufficient funding, and a climate‑driven shrinking of the safe weather windows when prescribed fire can be used. Even if CEQA vanished tomorrow, the state would still not have enough people, enough money, or enough cool, wet, wind‑free days to “aggressively manage” its landscape to safety on a planet that is relentlessly getting hotter. The people now clamoring for deregulation in the name of fire safety are, in many cases, the same political and corporate actors who have fought every meaningful cap on greenhouse gases and every attempt to make utilities bury their power lines or clear defensible space. They are not stewards; they are arsonists in a hurry to hand out matches, then blame the fire on the people trying to put it out. We defend open discourse, so let us have an honest one: the most aggressive action any governor could take to reduce fire risk is to sue the oil majors for the damages their product has already caused and to require every utility to underground its lines in high‑risk corridors before the next Santa Ana wind. That, and not a column sneering at tribal consultation, is what saving communities looks like.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: on social media when a self‑satisfied reply guy drops the link and says “See? All that red tape is burning California down.”

Oh, absolutely. The problem is that we have too many archaeologists checking for tribal artifacts, and not enough lumberjacks with executive orders. Brenda, whose Pacific Palisades house is now a rectangle of ash, should be comforted to know that her rebuild is stalled not because the soil is full of toxic heavy metals from burning car batteries, but because someone had to ask a tribal elder whether the bulldozer was about to chew up a burial ground. The column’s signature move—quoting the phrase “cultural monitoring” with the deadpan horror normally reserved for the audit section of a 1040—is a chef’s kiss of misplaced priorities. He is literally pointing at the requirement to consult Native people, the people who were managing this landscape with fire long before the first Spanish mission, and calling it the obstacle to fire safety. That is like blaming the lifeboats for the sinking because they took up deck space. In the real world, the biggest fire in California history, the 2020 August Complex, was ignited by a lightning storm after the driest winter in a century, and it spread through forests that had been subjected to decades of fire suppression and industrial logging — a combination that can leave dense, flammable debris. The only thing missing was a copy of CEQA to blame while the flames ate a million acres. The man is a sleepwalker wandering through a burning house, clutching a deregulation memo and insisting the alarm is too loud.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: at a city council meeting where a developer‑backed official is using this column to push for the elimination of environmental review in fire zones.

James Freeman, assistant editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, has written a column in which dead and displaced Californians are the emotional wallpaper for a deregulatory wish list. His marquee source, Christopher Rufo, is a professional grifter of the culture war whose documented playbook is to invent a moral panic—critical race theory, “wokeness,” now “cultural monitoring”—and use it to pry public institutions open for private plunder. The City Journal piece Freeman touts is part of a coordinated campaign, funded by the same donor networks that have spent forty years trying to hand federal lands over to timber and mining companies, to frame any environmental protection as anti‑human fanaticism. This is not a call for fire safety. It is a public‑relations vehicle for the industries that profit when fire risk is high: fossil fuel companies whose product ensures the fuels stay dried to kindling, utilities that would rather pay dividends than underground their lines, and developers who want to build in the wildland‑urban interface without the expensive safety standards that might make the next subdivision less likely to become a death trap. The column burns communities for profit and then blames the ashes on the people who tried to protect them. We are the ones who fund Cal Fire, who demand that PG&E and Southern California Edison bury their lines, who fight for the prescribed‑burn workforce Freeman’s editorial page would never fund, and who recognize that the most effective fuel‑reduction strategy on a rapidly heating planet is to stop heating the planet. They are the arsonists calling the fire fighters slow.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: when catharsis is the only thing that keeps you from throwing your phone into the ocean after reading one more op‑ed that blames everything except the thing.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board has gathered its finest minds to announce, with the studied solemnity of a coroner reading a cause of death, that the reason Californians are burning to death is that someone had to talk to a tribe before bulldozing a sacred site. The column is a masterpiece of the genre: a gish‑gallop of half‑cited media clips, a rhetorical question in the headline, a mocking aside about “whatever cultural monitoring is,” and a closing line that is one part Hallmark sympathy card and three parts corporate liability waiver. If only, James Freeman muses, Governor Newsom would take a chainsaw to the California Environmental Quality Act, the forests would be safe and the homes would be rebuilt. This is the logic of a man who walks into a hospital and, seeing cancer patients, declares that the real problem is the clipboard at the nurses’ station. The column’s emotional core—the picture of communities turned to ash—is real, and it is being held up like a hostage by an argument that would make the inferno worse. The prescription is more logging, less review, fewer pesky tribal voices, and above all, no mention of the carbon that made every one of those fires unstoppable. It is a whitewashed tomb: beautiful prose wrapped around a rotting corpse of an argument, the stench of which is the unmistakable odor of a fossil‑fuel donor trying to change the subject before the next wildfire lawsuit names the real defendants.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: from a pulpit, a lectern, or a moment of righteous fury when the only language adequate to the offense is the language of the prophets.

They have become dross; the unblushing face, the silver that was once pure and is now slag. The prophet’s indictment—Jeremiah’s words on the men who did not know how to blush—lands on a Wall Street editorial suite where the dead are raw material for a talking point. The column drapes itself in the language of public safety while serving the masters who profit from catastrophe. It is the hollow sound of a golden cup full of abominations, the gilding admired by the cameras while the cup itself is fucking empty. The author mocks the requirement to consult with the original stewards of this land, the very people who practiced the controlled burns that the column now claims it wants, and in the same breath demands that those burns proceed—without them. This is not merely incoherent; it is to’evah, the abomination the Hebrew Bible names: a civic religion that sanctifies profit over life, that treats widows and orphans as obstacles to growth, that makes a burnt child the price of a quarterly earnings report. The late Dr. King, in the year before his assassination, insisted that the triple evils of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism could not be fought separately, and the fire column is the proof. The racism is the contempt for indigenous knowledge; the materialism is the profit stream that demands we build in fire corridors and then blame the state for not clearing enough brush; the militarism is the language of war against the landscape itself. We name the system that produced this column. We name what it feeds. And we swear, by the God who heard the cries of the enslaved and the dispossessed, that we will not let the dead be lied about in the service of the men who lit the match.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched‑Earth

When to use: in the group chat, at the end of the thread, when the only answer left to a newspaper that keeps running the same arsonist’s alibi is a howl.

What the actual fuck is wrong with these people? The state is on fire, the sky turns fucking orange every October, people are burning to death in their cars because the evacuation routes bottlenecked, and the Wall Street Journal opinion page thinks the problem is that someone had to talk to a Native tribe before desecrating their cemetery. Cultural monitoring. That is the hill these vulture‑capitalist motherfuckers have chosen to die on. The column is a piece of ghoulish bullshit from top to bottom: it quotes a professional bigot, Christopher Rufo, as if he is a disinterested forest scientist; it cites Politico and CBS News to create the impression of a journalism consensus that does not exist; and it ends by suggesting, with the oily sincerity of a funeral‑home director who owns the cemetery, that California’s “eco‑bureaucracy” is letting communities burn to the ground. No. What is letting communities burn is a planetary fucking emergency caused by the very fossil‑fuel interests whose editorial‑page shills have been lying about it for forty years. The same paper that told us climate action would destroy the economy now wants to lecture us about fire safety? The same editorial board that calls every carbon tax a “job killer” now wrings its hands about dead children? Go fuck yourselves. The only honest thing in the entire column is the name of the author, and even that is a goddamn pseudonym for corporate power. We see you, James. We see your sources. We see the money. And we are not going to let you bury another generation of Californians under a pile of deregulatory bullshit while you collect your check and pretend you weren’t carrying the can of gasoline.

The Deeper Breakdown

The talking point that California’s environmental regulations and “eco‑bureaucracy” are the primary obstacles to reducing wildfire risk is a textbook case of the suppressed‑variable move. The column isolates a genuine, frustrating procedural reality—rebuilding after a disaster is slower than we want, and environmental review can add time—and then inflates it into the whole explanation, while deliberately ignoring the climate‑driven reality that is the actual, structural cause of the escalating fire crisis.

Who actually benefits from this framing. The fossil‑fuel industry is the most direct beneficiary, with timber and real‑estate developers also structurally aligned with the deregulatory push—though the campaign‑finance link for timber and developers is less directly evidenced. Fossil‑fuel companies and their political allies gain a perpetual distraction: every column that blames wildfires on red tape rather than on the burned‑over, heat‑baked conditions created by a century of carbon emissions is a column that does not name Exxon, Shell, or Chevron as defendants in the climate‑damages lawsuits that cities and the state are now pursuing. Developers benefit from the argument because it provides the political cover to eliminate or weaken safety standards (defensible‑space requirements, restrictions on building in very‑high‑fire‑severity zones) that, if enforced, would make building more expensive and less profitable. Timber companies and their advocates benefit from the narrative that commercial logging is equivalent to fuel reduction; the truth is that industry‑scale logging of large, fire‑resistant trees can actually increase fire risk by opening the canopy and drying out the forest floor, whereas the prescribed‑fire and thinning‑from‑below treatments that scientists recommend are labor‑intensive and yield little profit.

The receipts that prove it. The California Fourth Climate Change Assessment (2018) found that the area burned by wildfire in the state has increased fivefold since the 1970s, with warming temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt being the primary drivers. A 2023 study in Environmental Research Letters attributed the majority of the observed increase in forest‑fire area in the western U.S. to human‑caused climate change. Cal Fire’s “2022 Strategic Fire Plan for California” names climate change—specifically “more frequent and intense heatwaves, persistent drought, and drier fuels”—as the predominant threat multiplier, while noting that 95 percent of wildfires are human‑caused in terms of ignition but that the scale and severity of those fires are determined overwhelmingly by fuel aridity, which is a direct function of temperature and drought.

The U.S. Forest Service’s 2022 “Confronting the Wildfire Crisis” strategy explicitly identifies workforce shortages, lack of funding, and a shrinking burn‑window due to climate change as the most significant barriers to fuel treatment, not environmental review. A 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that California’s prescribed‑fire deficit exists not because of CEQA but because of a century of aggressive fire suppression, land‑use fragmentation, and insufficient investment in training and crew availability. The “cultural monitoring” Freeman derides is a duty under the California Environmental Quality Act and the National Historic Preservation Act to consult with tribes, whose ancestors practiced extensive cultural burning for millennia—the same low‑intensity prescribed fire that fire ecologists now overwhelmingly endorse.

The column is an engineered inversion: it takes a disaster whose magnitude is a climate signal and recasts it as a governance failure, so that the solution is not emissions reduction but the removal of the regulations that protect both people and the environment from the industries that profit from the status quo.