The Truth About Wildfires | Monologue Monday

Wildfires are getting worse.

Almost everyone agrees on that.

But what happens after the agreement?

This episode isn't about debating climate change. It's about asking the question almost nobody asks:

Now what?

After traveling through Montana during one of the worst wildfire smoke events in recent memory, Chad investigates why America has become so good at diagnosing problems—and so bad at implementing solutions.

The surprising discovery?

The plans already exist.

Federal agencies have them.

States have them.

Scientists have them.

The tools work.

Controlled burns.

Forest thinning.

Home hardening.

Utility improvements.

Real-world examples prove they save forests, homes, and lives.

So why aren't they happening at the scale they should?

This episode explores the incentives, funding priorities, bureaucracy, media incentives, and political dynamics that reward talking about disasters far more than preventing them.

Because common sense says if the risk is increasing...

...prevention should increase too.

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🎙️ Rumble Exclusive Q&A follows every full episode.

Chapters

00:00 – Agreement Isn't the Solution

03:47 – When Everyone Agrees...Nothing Happens

09:49 – America's Wildfire Reality

16:03 – The Solutions Already Exist

19:21 – Why Prevention Never Makes Headlines

21:45 – Following the Money

25:12 – The Politics of Climate Policy

27:11 – Proof That Prevention Works

31:24 – Accountability vs Agreement

34:29 – Changing the Conversation

37:26 – Reagan Reminder & Final Thoughts

39:40 – Rumble Exclusive Q&A

#Wildfires #ForestManagement #ClimateChange #CommonSense #PublicPolicy #WildfirePrevention #Politics #Environment #Preparedness #MonologueMonday

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

America, we're told our whole lives that agreement is the finish line. That the fighting stops when everyone finally lands on the same page. That the happy ending is the moment we all nod and go, yeah, you're right, I agree. And most of the time, that is true. But there's one strange little category of problem where the opposite happens, where the second everybody agrees is the second everything stops. You've lived this. You've got a printer at work. That printer's been broken since roughly the Obama administration, and every single person who walks past it agrees, no debate unanimous, the most bipartisan issue in the building. That printer is busted. Somebody should really do something about that printer. And then everybody walks away for nine years. Because we all agree it's broken, quietly became the same thing we say instead of fixing it. Agreement was supposed to be the start of the solution. Somehow it turned into a replacement for one. Now, it's a printer. Who cares? But what happens when it's not a printer? When it's one of the biggest, most expensive, most dangerous problems in the entire country, and we've agreed on it so hard, so completely, that nobody stopped to ask the one question that actually matters. Something happened to me this summer that put that question in my head and it would not leave. But hang on, first this. Before we get started, one quick thing. If common sense has become a part of your weekly routine, Chad Parker Law is your home base. Every week you'll find something new. Whether it's my latest books, a new editorial piece, the gaily news, or my free Common Sense Conservative Manifesto, or everything else we're building together. And if you've got a question, an idea for an episode, or you think I completely missed the mark, call or text me at 252 Chad Law. Some of the best conversations on this show start with your messages. All right, we'll be right back after these words.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

When you need common sense, come see Chad Law. The boldest pundit you ever saw. It's truth, truth. It's hard and the talk is real. Reality rules, and that's the appeal. Spreading truth. That's his car's opening. Who needs a part? When you need common sense, then comes to Chad. He lays down the law when the lights get bad. I may think you're dense. Come where it's real.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

With common sense. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality, broadcasting truth on the only rainbow that matters: the red, white, and blue rainbow. And this is common sense. This is the show where we read the fine print so you don't have to, where we bring receipts instead of outrage, where politics is really just the starting point for something much bigger. This is the shelter for the politically homeless, where reality gets a vote, results matter, truth matters, common sense matters. So welcome home, America. All right, folks, here's what I want to do tonight. And I want to be really clear about it up front, because I know the second I say one particular phrase, half of you are gonna think you already know which episode this is. You don't. But watch, here it comes. Climate change. See? Some of you just sat up ready to fight. Some of you just relaxed, figured, oh good, he's on my team. And both of you? Both of you are about to be a little disappointed because that is not the show. I'm not here to tell you whether climate change is real. I'm not gonna litigate the temperature of the planet for an hour. There are plenty of other places to go get that fight. For the next hour, I'm gonna do something almost nobody in this whole conversation ever does. I'm gonna agree for the sake of the episode. Let's just stipulate the whole thing. The conditions are changing. It's hotter, it's drier, the seasons are longer, the fires are bigger. Fine, agreed. Whatever percentage you want to hang on it, I'll give you all of it. I'll spot you the entire diagnosis. Because here's what I noticed. And once you see it, you'll never be able to unsee it. The name of the game for my show, every episode. That now happens to be where the conversation ends. The whole national conversation, the news, the politicians, the expert, the guy screaming at you in all caps online. The entire thing is collapsed down into one half of a sentence. The conditions are changing. Period. Full stop. Roll the credits, everybody goes home. But folks, there's supposed to be a second half. There's supposed to be a comma. And then the part where a grown-up country says, okay, and here is what we're going to do about it. That part's gone. Nobody says it. We got so good at naming the problem we forgot that naming it was never the point. So that's the question. That's the whole show tonight. Not is it real? We're past that. It's the part nobody says out loud. Okay, fine, say it is climate change. Say we agree. Now what? And I'll be honest, when I first started pulling on this, I figured the answer was going to be depressing. I figured the reason nobody finishes the sentence is that there is no second half. Nobody actually knows what to do. We're all just standing around the broken printer deep down, knowing it can't be fixed. Guess what? That is not what I found. Not even close. And what I found, folks, is actually stranger and more frustrating. And I did not expect this a whole lot more hopeful. Because the second half of the sentence does exist. Somebody wrote it out. It's just that almost nobody in America is reading it. But anyways, I'm getting ahead of myself. I always do. Let me take you back to where this started because it didn't come from a think tank or a cable panel. It came to it the way most of you come to things by accident on a trip. So you all know I was off last week in Montana. Wanted to go to Montana my whole life, and the pictures do not lie. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever stood. The sky's bigger there. That's not a saying it's physically bigger. Mountains that don't look real. I got there, I looked out at the most beautiful country God ever drew up, and I couldn't see it. Because the whole thing was full of smoke. A sky the color of a dirty penny. The range I drove a thousand miles to see swapped out overnight for a flat gray wall. Some days you could taste it. And the stuff you'd blow out of your nose at night, well, we're not going to do that part on television, but you know exactly what I mean. So I'm standing in one of the last genuinely wild places left in America, squinting through smoke to find the mountain, and I did the thing you did. I asked the guy pumping gas. I asked the woman at the front desk. I asked a fishing guide, the guy with hands like leather, kind of man who doesn't waste words on a tourist like me. Anybody who'd hold still, same question every time, what is going on with all this smoke? I'd ask. And I want you to hear how they answered. It wasn't angry, it wasn't political. They'd just look up at that gray sky, give a little shrug, and say, climate change. Said the exact way you'd say, supposed to rain Thursday. Just the weather, a fact of life. Every one of them. And then right back to where the trout weren't biting. And here's the part where half of you are bracing for the rant. I'm not going to. Because I did what I told you I'd do. I accepted it. It's hotter, it's drier, the whole place is a tinder box, fine. These folks live in it. Climate change, I'll take it, I'll take their word for it. And I went back to enjoy my trip. But I got back and it kept nagging at me. And it took me a couple days to figure out what it even was. It wasn't the answer. The answer was fine. It was what came after that answer. Which, in fact, was nothing. Every time, every person, the sentence just stopped. Nobody, in one of the places most affected by this on the whole continent, nobody ever said climate change, and so here's what either nobody's doing about it or what we need to do about it. Nobody finished it. And I remember the second it hit me, I'm looking at this gray sky where a mountain's supposed to be, and I realize everybody here agreed. Total agreement. Actually, the most agreement I've ever seen anyone agree about anything. But the agreement was the finish line, not the start, the finish. And standing there in the mountains of Montana, I swear to you, I thought about that broken office printer. Same exact thing. Total agreement, zero repair. So of course I came home with a question stuck in my head. Not is it real? I gave them that. The part nobody up there would say. Okay, we agree. Now what? And I could not let it go. Now, before we go hunting for the second half, you need to see how big this is, because it's not a Montana problem. I just happen to be standing in it in Montana. It's everywhere right now. Start north of us, in Canada. As I'm talking to you, Canada's on fire in a way that's honestly hard to picture. Thousands of active fires, millions of acres burned this season, and that smoke doesn't politely stay in Canada. It comes here. This summer it put more than a hundred million Americans under air quality alerts. A hundred million. And that's not the West Coast, that's the Midwest. The Great Lakes, the Northeast, New York City turned orange, folks in DC looking at the Lincoln Memorial through a brown haze. Air so bad they were telling anyone with a working set of lungs to just stay inside. And here's what got me. Canada's own Prime Minister, Mark Carney, calls it one of the most intense fire seasons in his country's history. And what's he pointing to? Extreme heat, record dryness, climate change. There it is again. Everybody agrees. Now come home because while Canada's smoke chokes the East Coast, the West is doing its own thing here in the U.S. Right now, as we're live, the city of Spokane, Washington is a living nightmare. A fire called the Old Trails Fire kicked off on a Saturday afternoon, and within hours it had jumped the Spokane River and was into neighborhoods. One person watching it come through said it was like a nuclear bomb going off. Sixty five thousand people ordered out of their homes, hundreds of houses gone, they evacuated a VA hospital, the National Guard's there, and as I tell you this, they're nowhere close to containing it. Sixty five thousand people. That's not a statistic. That's a whole city throwing what they can grab in their car and leaving. And that's the state right next door to me. As you know, I'm in Oregon a good chunk of the year, and Oregon's having what may be the worst fire season in the modern history of the state. By the end of July, we've burned around 1.7 million acres, already on pace to blow past our all-time record, with summer nowhere near over. One complex out in Wheeler County hit 150,000 acres on its own and shut down a U.S. highway. Just closed the road. We've got evacuations, highway closures, 100 million people told to stay inside, records falling in three states at once. And notice what I just did. I didn't argue with a word of it. I just laid it on the table because you and I don't disagree about any of this. Remember, it's real, it's big, it's worse. Everybody left right, the guy who pumped my gas in Montana, everybody agrees. Which brings us to the one guy who said the quiet part out loud. While all this is burning, the president of the United States does what he does. He gets on the phone on Truth Social. Now, quick public service announcement because this did get a little messy. There was a screenshot going around of Trump supposedly saying he'd fly to California, turn on some giant faucet, and aim it at Canada. That one's fake. Somebody made it up, and a whole lot of people shared it without blinking, some to laugh at him, some to defend him over a thing he never said. Hang on to that, we'll come back to it, because it ties into how fast we'll believe just about anything. But nonetheless. So here's what Trump actually said, real on the record. Mid-July, Trump, Truth Social, goes after Canada, says they're not managing their forests, accuses them of willful negligence, says the smoke's their fault for not clearing the dead stuff, and floats bolting the cost onto their tariffs. Couple days later, he tells reporters that he's going back four or five years. He doesn't remember a problem like this. Okay. Let's do this fair. I'm not here to pile on, not here to defend, just look at it. What did he get right? That fuel builds up, that a forest packed with dead, dry growth burns hotter than a healthy one. That is true, not controversial. That's fire science. And that it's a yearly thing now? Also true. Where did he overstate? Pitting it on Canada being lazy skips right past what Canada's own prime minister and every fire scientist is pointing at. The heat, the drought, and the idea Canada could just rake out its forests. A lot of what's burning up there is boreal forest, a wilderness the size of a continent. You're not sending a crew with leaf blowers into that. The experts up there will tell you flat out, in a lot of that country you let it burn because you couldn't manage it if you tried. And no problem four or five years ago, a couple of summers back, was worse than this one. So there's your food fight. Part right, part wrong, and you already know how the next two weeks of cable went. One side clips the true half, the other clips the wrong half, everybody screaming, nobody moving. But folks, whether Trump was right or wrong about Canada's forests is not what caught my attention. Here's what caught my attention. He tried to answer the second question. Everybody else stopped at climate change. The diagnosis. Trump kept going. He got all the way to, and so here's what somebody ought to be doing about it. His version of now what was aimed at the wrong country and half wrong of the facts. Fine. But at least he reached for the second half of the sentence, no one else is. And that's what made him stand out. Not because he was right, because almost nobody else even gets there. Everybody agreed on the problem and went home. He's over here, wrong address and all, at least asking what we do about it. And that stopped me cold because if the guy the whole country is fighting about is one of the only people reaching for now what? Then where's everybody with the right answer? Right? We agree it's real. We agree it's worse. We agree, we agree, we agree. So somebody's out there has got to be doing the actual work. Somebody's got to have a plan. So I went and looked for it. And what I found, I did not expect. Let me show you. And first, before I do that, I had to get straight on one thing. Is this actually getting worse? Or does it just feel worse because it's on our phones every night? Well, it's worse. You don't need a climate model to see it. You can see it in the snow. This past spring when the mountain snowpack is supposed to peak, the water in the bank that keeps the forest damp all summer, Oregon, was at only 14% of normal. 14. That's not a forest. That's kindling with a view. So agreed. The risk is up, and this is exactly where I kept waiting for the now what to show up, because here's the common sense part. If the risk is going up, shouldn't the prevention be going up along with it? That's not political. That's how a normal person runs their life. If your street starts flooding every year, you don't stand in the driveway going, yep, more floods now, and walk back inside. You clean the gutters, you do more of the boring stuff because the risk went up. And here's the part that got me. We've got a whole toolbox of boring stuff that works on fire. You thin the forest so it's not packed wall to wall with dead fuel. You do controlled burns, good fire on a calm day to clear the junk before the bad fire does. You graze the brush down, you clear a buffer around homes, you harden the power lines so they quit starting fires. None of it's science fiction. Foresters have known this for hundreds of years. So the risk is climbing, the tools exist, everybody agrees it's a problem, and I'm sitting there going, okay, where's all the prevention? Where's the version where the clear the brush side gets even half as loud as the climate change side? And that's a really good question, which in my experience is the sign you're about to find something. Now, I gotta be honest about where my head was at going in, because I was cynical. I figured I already knew why nobody finishes the sentence. There's no plan. There can't be a plan. If there was a plan, we'd follow it, right? That's the whole reason why we stop it, climate change, because after that it's a shrug. Nobody's got a reel written down. This is what we do plan sitting somewhere. It doesn't exist. That's what I was sure I'd find. Boy was I wrong. Way wrong. It exists. Somebody wrote it all down, and it's not too hard to find. Even the state of Oregon, the sad state of Oregon has a plan. Not a memo, a plan. The 20-year landscape resiliency strategy. It maps 13 million acres of the highest risk land in the state and lays out how to treat it. Thinning, controlled burns, restoration, sitting on a government website. State of Washington's got one too. A 20-year forest health plan goal, in writing of bringing over a million acres back to healthy. And the feds in DC have a national one. The wildfire crisis strategy goal, treat 50 million more acres. It's a real document with real numbers and a real timeline. So let me build this back slow because it took me a minute. I went hunting for the missing second half of the sentence, assuming nobody'd bothered to write it. They wrote it. Years ago. There are 20 year plans sitting on government websites right now, mapped, costed out. Nobody talks about them. And that flipped the whole thing for me. See, I walked in thinking we had an ideas problem. We don't have an ideas problem. We have an attention problem. Look at the split. All summer the news says climate change a dozen ways every night. And the actual plan with your own state's name on the cover sits quietly in a PDF that almost nobody opens. The media says climate a dozen ways, the plan is a PDF nobody opens. Think about that. And what got me, and I'm not even mad about it. Ask yourself which of those two is built to grab you. A wall of orange smoke over Manhattan? That's a story. A hundred and forty page forest strategy with a treatment schedule in the back? That's homework. Nobody's leading the news with update. State continues methodical thinning program on schedule. Because it doesn't scare you, doesn't make you cheer. Disasters are news, maintenance is boring, the fire is a headline, but the plan to prevent it is a spreadsheet. So one gets a dozen segments a night and the other sits in a drawer. Not because it's secret, just because nobody's ever thrown a parade for a maintenance schedule, which we should be. Now, before you decide this is all nice theory on paper, wait till I show you what happened in Oregon on one fire where one side of the ground got taken care of and the other side right next to it didn't. We'll get there. But first I had to answer the thing chewing on me. If the plans exist and the tools work and everyone agrees on the problem, then why on earth aren't we doing them? Like at all. Here's where it gets real and a little maddening because the answer's not one thing. It's a stack. So I'll walk you through it. Start with the money punchline first. We are way better at paying for the fire than paying for the prevention. For years, the Forest Service budget worked like this. Fighting fires ate so much of the money they were raiding the prevention accounts to pay for it. You take the money you'd spend to prevent the fire, and you'd spend it fighting the fire you didn't prevent. I mean, that's the guy who skips the $40 oil change and then ends up buying a $4,000 engine every year. And the backlog is staggering. The feds have around $117 million. Acres of high risk land waiting on treatment. Last year they treated about three million. I'm no math genius, but that's not a pace where the forest ever catches up. That's a pace where the to-do list might win sometimes. So it's underfunded. Why? And this is where you meet the rest of the reasons. None of them are cartoon villains. They're incentives, like everything. There's permitting. Before a lot of this can happen on federal land, it's got to go through environmental review, the paperwork, the studies, the lawsuits, years. There are cases where they flagged a patch of forest that needed treating, started the process, and the forest burned down while the paperwork was still moving. Happens all the time. The review meant to protect the forest outlived the forest it was meant to protect. There's liability. Think about it. A controlled burn's one of the best tools we've got. But if you light it and the wind kicks up and it gets away, that's your career. Maybe worse. So a lot of careful people look at that and just don't light the match. The safe move is to do nothing. And when the safe move for every individual is nothing, guess what the system does? And then there's the money on the other end, the utilities. And I want to be fair here because this one gets demagogued to death. Out in California, the power company's equipment has started some of the deadliest fires in American history. Paradise, the town that burned off the map. That was PG ⁇ E's lines. So the state set up a fund to cover utility fire damage, and this summer, in the last hours of the legislative session, Governor Newsom pushed through another $18 billion to refill it, about half of it coming right off your electric bill on a surcharge that now runs out to twenty forty-five. Now fair is fair. That bill's got real accountability strings in it, and the utilities cover a chunk. That's not a pure handout. Here's the part that'll make your teeth itch. While that fund's getting topped off partly on your bill, PG ⁇ E cleared around two and a half billion in profit last year and switched its dividend back on. And the big utilities together ran the most expensive lobbying campaign in the history of California. They can afford the lobbyists, they can afford the dividend. You're on the surcharge until 2045. And one honesty note, the fire that drained the fund this time wasn't even PGE's, it was another company's. And Newsom didn't invent this. He did the same rescue back in 2019, right after PGE's bankruptcy. So it's not a one bad guy, it's a pattern. It's a system that's good at paying for the aftermath. Now, I promised you I'd chase down one more thing all the way down, and the answer surprised me. There's a version going around that says the real problem is climate policy itself. That all net zero count every molecule rules are secretly what's blocking the thinning and the burning. And I went in half hoping to find the smoking gun. It'd make a heck of a show. But here's the honest truth. There's a little something there, but it's not the conspiracy we thought it was. There are some dumb wrinkles. The smoke from a wildfire, the air rules basically give that a pass. But the smoke from a good controlled burn, the one that we light on purpose to stop the big one, that can count against a state's air quality record. So the rules scold you for the little fire that prevents the catastrophe. That's real, dumb, they need to fix it. But is the net zero the big secret reason America doesn't prevent fires? No. The honest answer is the boring one. Money, staffing, liability, permitting. A hundred little frictions, not one boogeyman from a bumper sticker, which is a little disappointing because a boogeyman would have been an easier show for me to do. But underneath all of it, there's one last thing, the quietest one, and it's about us. Agreeing that climate change is real costs you nothing. But it feels good, even feels like understanding. You nod, you're on the right side, you're done. But actually holding somebody's feet to the fire, no pun intended, on whether the thinning got done, whether the backlog shrank, that's hard. It's boring, it makes enemies. Agreement is comfortable. Accountability is a fight. And as a nation, we have sure shied away from accountability. So we take the comfortable one just about every time. So let me put it all together. Why does the conversation stop dead at climate change? It's not that there's no second half. It's that the second half is slow and boring and expensive and it makes no sound when it's working. So it loses every time to a wall of flames. The plans exist, the tools work, everybody agrees on the risk. We are not stuck because nobody knows what to do. Which left me one thing I had to find out for myself. Because a plan on a website is the easiest thing in the world to ignore right up until you find out whether it works. Until you can stand at the edge of a real fire and look at one piece of ground somebody took care of, and the piece right next to it that nobody did, and the difference with your own two eyes. I found that place. It's in Oregon today. You can see it yourself. Let me take you there. Southern Oregon a few years back, fire they called the bootleg fire, it became a monster, one of the biggest in modern history of the state. Over four hundred thousand acres burned for more than a month. And sitting right in its path was a preserve called the Sakan Marsh. And for sixteen years, sixteen years, a group of folks had been quietly taking care of that ground, the Nature Conservancy. The Klamath tribes, the Forest Service, thinning the crowded trees, doing controlled burns over and over year after year. The boring stuff, nobody posting big prescribed burn energy today. No, they were just doing the work. Then the monster showed up. Picture what the firefighters saw. They were standing right there. In the untreated forest, the packed, crowded, never touched forest, the flames were running two hundred feet in the air, taller than a twenty-story building. Roaring through the tops of trees, the kind of fire you do not fight, you run. And then that same fire, same day, same wind, same drought, crosses onto the ground somebody had taken care of. You already know what happened. It dropped. Literally just they describe it like a wall turning into a campfire. The 200 foot wall just literally fell out of the sky, settles onto the forest floor and crawls like a campfire, like fires supposed to behave. One of them said it was like somebody flipped a switch. On one side was the apocalypse, on the other side a forest that lived and is still living. And when the scientists went back and measured it, the numbers said exactly what those firefighters watched happen. The cared for ground burned gentle trees survived. The neglected ground right next door burned to nothing. Same fire, same day, one side lived because somebody bothered. That's not a model, that's not a projection, that's a photograph. You can go stand there and look at it right now. I have. And it's not just the forests, look at the houses. When they studied Paradise, the California town a PG ⁇ E fire erased, they found something that ought to be shouted from the rooftops. The homes built under the newer, tougher fire codes survived at about four times the rate of the older ones. Again, same fire, same street, half the time, one house, ember resistant vents, cleared space, the right roof, still standing. The one next door built the old way, gone. The fire wasn't choosing at random, it was choosing based on who'd done the work. And across a whole stack of California's worst fires, harden the house, clear the space around it, and you roughly double how many homes walk away. Double. And then there's the power companies. And this one's almost hopeful because it is a redemption story. Down in San Diego, the utility SDGE. Their equipment helped start catastrophic fires back in 2007. And they could have done what PGE did up north, limp along, get sued, go bankrupt, do it again. They went the other way, rebuilt themselves, their own weather station network, hardened hundreds of miles of line, cameras, sensors, turned themselves into the most fire careful utility in the country. And the fires, their own equipment starts, dropped through the floor. Same industry, same danger. One became the cautionary tale, one became the model. The difference wasn't luck, it was a choice and a whole lot of unglamorous follow-through. So set those three side by side, the forest that lived, the houses that stood, the utility that stopped starting fires, and you land somewhere that took a weight off my chest at least. We are not helpless. We know how to make this less bad. It's not a mystery, we know. So then the obvious question, if we know, why does none of it break through? Why'd I have to go digging to find that fire? Why isn't that the story every summer? And the answer's just human. Forgivably human. Because we flipped the script. We're not doing ribbon cuttings for prescribed burns. We should be. There's no mayor at a podium going, I'm proud to announce that this August, thanks to 16 years of careful thinning, nothing happened. That's not a photo op. It should be. Nobody runs the fire that never started on the front page because you can't take a picture of it. That's the trap. Prevention succeeds by making the news that never happens. Its whole reward is silence, the forest that quietly doesn't burn, the house still standing in the morning, the firefighter who never got the call, so nobody ever thanks him because as far as the world knows, there was nothing to thank him for. But disaster is loud. Flames, evacuations, a reporter leaning into the wind. It gets a week of coverage. Prevention is a guy with a drip torch on a Tuesday in April doing something tedious that done right, ends in absolutely nothing you'll ever hear about. So of course the diagnosis wins the microphone. It was never a fair fight for your attention. One side's a wall of flame, the other's a maintenance schedule. Guess which one gets the airtime? This is what we need to fix as common sense folks. And it's not a scandal. Nobody did it on purpose. It's just how our attention's built. We notice the collapse, never the inspection. We remember the disaster, never the thousand ordinary days somebody kept it from happening. And that's the thing I drove home from Montana chewing on. That's the second half of the sentence nobody up there would finish. Because we've got this exactly backwards, folks. We treat the risk is rising and let's talk about prevention like they're two different teams. Like caring about the climate and caring about clearing the brush are opposite sides of the fight. Folks, they're the same sentence. If you genuinely believe the risk is going up, it's hotter, drier, bigger fires, then the thinning matters more, not less. The controlled burns matter more. The hardened house matters more. The worse you think it's getting, the more every ounce of prevention is worth. Which means the people who believe hardest that the climate's changing ought to be the loudest voices for stewardship. Somehow they've gone quiet. That's the trap this whole country wandered into. We got so good at agreeing on the diagnosis that we treated it like the finish line. The explanation got louder than the solution. And the sentence just stopped. Climate change should never be the period at the end of that sentence. It's the comma. Climate change, comma, and here's what we do about it. And it turns out the part after the comma was never hiding. It actually might be the least mysterious thing in the world. Okay. We agree, climate change. Now what? Now, the thinning, the good fire, the plan somebody already wrote that's nobody's reading. The boring, unglamorous, nobody claps for at work of taking care of the place. And folks, that's the answer. It was always the answer. Just sadly, it doesn't trend. We need to make this stuff trend. So this was never a fight between believing in climate change and believing in forest management. That was a fake fight created by the media. You don't have to pick a side. It's simpler than that. If the risk has changed, the way we take care of the place has to change with it. We know how. We've watched it work, we've got the photograph. The only thing left is to start finishing the sentence. But I want to take you back to Montana one more time. Not to the smoke. Because there was a morning near the end of the trip when the wind finally shifted, and I walked outside with my coffee, and that gray wall was just gone. And there it was, the whole thing. The mountains I'd driven a thousand miles to sea, standing exactly where they'd been the entire time, just hiding behind the smoke, snow on the peaks in the middle of July, and it stopped me dead in the driveway. Because I finally got to see what the smoke had been standing in front of. That right there is what's actually at stake. Not a talking point, not a statistic, that. And here's what I want you to carry out of tonight. We are not standing around helpless. The plan exists with your state's name on them. The science exists, and the picture exists. The forests that lived, the houses that stood, the utility that stopped starting fires. I've seen it, you can see it. We don't have an ideas problem in this country. We never did. You've got an attention problem, and an attention problem that's fixable. Might be the most fixable thing there is. But let me be clear, it's not easy. And the reasons got nothing to do with left or right. When prevention's working, the result that nothing happens, and nothing is the easiest thing in the world to quietly stop paying for. That's not conspiracy. It's just what happens when the reward for doing the job right is that you've got nothing to show for it. That's who we should be rewarding, paying, cutting ribbons for. And I gotta be honest about the last piece, because part of why I this keeps happening is us. Problem this big feels like it's happening way over our heads. And when something feels that far out of your hands, there's a quiet relief in just agreeing, nodding. Yep, climate change, terrible. It feels like understanding, and it's so much easier than asking whether anyone's actually doing the work. Agreeing is comfortable. That's why we stopped there. Not because somebody's fooling us, just because the diagnosis is a soft place to land, and the next question is a lot of work. So that's the whole hour. Not a slogan, not a side, just the next question. Okay, we agree. Now what? We spent this whole hour hunting for the answer to that, and it was never even hiding. It was written down the whole time, waiting on someone to read it out loud. So now we read it. Now we do the quiet work because we've watched it work. And that's where Reagan really comes to mind for tonight. Not one of the famous lines, a quieter one. He said, and I quote, the greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things. Nobody's waiting around on a hero to walk in and put out every fire. The job is getting all of us to do the dull, thankless work together, the guy clearing his own brush and the neighbor who finally reads the plan. Not heroic, just done. So the next time you hear it, and you probably will this week, the next time somebody says climate change and just stops, don't argue, don't take the bait. Just ask them the quiet question. Okay, we agree. Now what? Because we already know the answer. We always did. No one is rewarding it. And America, this has been common sense. Stick around while I answer all the questions that came in during the show, at least the best ones. I'm gonna take 10 seconds to reset the studio, and I'll be right back to answer your questions that you texted in live during the show to 252 Chad Log. Alright! Let's hit the text. This is my favorite part. Text from Marcus in Ohio. I know Marcus. When you said you'd give them the whole diagnosis, do you actually believe climate change is the main driver, or were you just being tactical? Uh good catch, Marcus. And honestly, my opinion on the exact percentage doesn't really matter. That's kind of the point. If I get up there and give you my number down to the decimal, we spend the whole hour fighting about my number instead of doing anything. So I gave it away on purpose, because the second we stop arguing about the diagnosis, we can finally talk about the part that actually saves house. I'd rather be a little vague about the thermostat and dead right about the second half of the sentence. It's not dodging, that's refusing to fall in the exact trap the whole country's stuck in. Good question, Marcus. Danielle in Colorado ending in eight eight zero two. Pushing back. Controlled burns aren't harmless. Haven't some escaped and burned down the towns they were supposed to protect? Feels like you undersold the risk. That's a great hit, Danielle, and I'm not going to wave it off. Yes, it's happened. A burn gets away, the wind does something nobody could forecast, and the tool you were just using to prevent a disaster becomes one. That's real and it's awful. So here's the nuance I didn't have room for tonight. Two things are true at once. Well, over ninety-nine percent of these go exactly as planned. And you never hear about them because nothing happened isn't news. And the rare escape is a catastrophe that runs for a week. So the escape terrifies everyone and the fear freezes the whole system. But the answer to sometimes it escapes, less than 1% of the time, isn't never burn. Because that packed dead forest burns too, it just burns on its own schedule at 200 feet with nobody in control. The choice was never fire or no fire. It's fire we choose on a calm Tuesday or fire that chooses us in August. I'll take Tuesday. All right, text from Ray in Tennessee ending in one one five OK, I'm sold, but I'm just a regular guy in Tennessee. What am I actually supposed to do? Best question of the night, Ray. More than you'd think. You live near the woods with the brush. The most powerful thing on this episode show is the stuff completely in your control. Clear the space around your house, harden it up. You can roughly double whether your home survives, no permit, no politician. That's a Saturday. Second, next time somebody in charge says, Oh, the fire's climate change and stops, asks them the second question out loud. What's the prevention budget? Is the backlog shrinking? Watch how fast the room changes. And read your state's plan once. It's homework, I know, but you'll be the most informed person at every dinner table for every year. Your house, the second question, one boring PDF. That's a citizen doing the job. Thank you. All right, text from Sue in Michigan ending in six zero nine three. Forget policy. What's the thing from Montana you'll remember for the rest of your life? Ah, Sue? You'd think it'd be the mountains, it's not. It's the night the smoke lifted. For days I'd been staring at this grey nothing, and one evening it just cleared, and I walked out, and the sky. I hadn't seen stars like that since I was a kid, real once. Edge to edge. And I stood out there way too long freezing, just looking up, and what got me is that I felt almost embarrassed by how grateful I was for a clear sky, something I'd taken for granted my whole life. Took a week of smoke to make me actually see clear air, and that's probably where half this episode came from. Because we don't notice the thing that's working until it's gone, right? Which is pretty much this whole show. Anyways, the stars. That's the one I'll never forget. Okay, great question. Uh text from Tyler in Arizona ending in 2318. Completely unrelated, and I need to know non-negotiable road trip snack. Ha ha ha ha. Tyler, finally a question that matters. Obviously, beef jerky. But sour cream and onion lays potato chips and monster energy. That's all I need. I also have that disgusting sunflower seeds habit in the shell. You know, the cup situation and people accidentally get in the car and drink all your leftovers. But a long empty highway and a bag of sunflower seeds lays sour cream and onion and monster energy. Keeps me happy as a clam on the road. All right. That's our show, gang. We got not very many questions tonight. That's all right. Thanks for hanging out after hours. If you see us, share us. That's the whole ask. Don't forget the phone number 252 Chad Law. God bless you, President Reagan. And as always, may God save America.

SPEAKER_02 43:53

Marvel that you should care for me. Yes, you've made my life so glamorous. You can't blame me for failing. It's so marvelous. That's you should get the for me. It's one story as it's glance.