The leftist media can get so cuckoo for cocoa puffs it burns! Literally.
Left-wing magazine The Nation published a bizarre article Dec. 23 against home ownership headlined “California’s Fires Prove the American Dream Is Flammable.” It argued that “Yes, climate change intensifies the fires—but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive.”
The article continued to whine: “Our ideas about what success, comfort, home, and family should look like are so ingrained, it’s hard for us to see how they could be reinforcing the very conditions that put us at such grave risk.”
The main culprit for The Nation, was a belief in the ideal of “private homeownership.”
The magazine’s solution: “we need to do more than upgrade the powerlines or stage a public takeover of the utility companies. We need to rethink the ideologies that govern how we plan and build our homes” [emphasis added].
So everyone needs to stop believing in private property rights? OK.
The magazine strangely noted that following the November Camp Fire, that 2018 “might be considered a year of climate change awareness, bookended by the news that we may only have a dozen years to contain global warming and the Global Climate Strike this September.” [Emphasis added.] The Nation conveniently left out that “there is no scientific consensus, much less unanimity, that the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem.”
It didn’t take long for The Nation to somehow trace its issue with private ownership exacerbating natural disasters to identity politics, class-warfare and inequity. (Of course, it did.) The article argued that views and policies on private homeownership were cemented by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and noted (emphasis mine):
In and around so many cities, new building technologies, racist lending practices, systemic criminalization of the poor and people of color, uneven patterns of ‘creative destruction’—that is, cycles of investment and disinvestment across city centers and suburbs—favored one kind of residential development: single-family houses for those deemed qualified, which typically meant white, middle-class families.
The argument grew more bizarre when the liberal outlet fretted that “the idealization of individual homeownership [amongst other things] have created the scorching landscapes we face today. Cheap energy is untenable in the face of climate emergency. And individual homeownership should be seriously questioned” [emphasis added].
For The Nation, “The valorizing of homeownership and property rights results not only in increased exposure to climate-change-fueled fires, but also in our inadequate responses to them.”
Missing was critique of any other factors that could have contributed to the wildfires, such as “decades of mistakes by government agencies that caused the woodlands [in California] to become overly dense and blanketed with highly flammable dead wood and underbrush.”
