Suchergebnisse

Renowned chef and humanitarian José Andres joins David to talk about his love of cooking, the political situation in Catalonia, his disaster relief efforts in Puerto Rico, and much more.
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Congressman Luis Gutierrez discusses his formative years in Puerto Rico, his political education in Chicago alongside Harold Washington, and his hopes and fears for immigration policy under the Trump administration.
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Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago, joins David to talk about his journey to the highest levels of the Catholic church, visiting Puerto Rico in aftermath of Hurricane Maria, the impact of the recent tax bill, gun violence in Chicago, and more.
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Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor joins David on the Axe Files on CNN to discuss the shifting dynamics on the bench after Brett Kavanaugh's bitter confirmation battle, her personal ties to Puerto Rico and whether the response to Hurricane Maria was adequate, and her journey from the Bronx to the highest court in the land.
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Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the hit Broadway musical "Hamilton," talks to David about what he learned from meeting Stephen Sondheim in high school, what would surprise the Founders about our politics today, his advocacy for Puerto Rico as Congress debated how to address the island's debt crisis, and why he can't allow his creative output to be held captive to his own successes.
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Yesterday, The Washington
Post published an op-ed
piece written by Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines
about the awful wildfire season we've been experiencing here in Montana and the
West. It is good to bring attention to an issue that has gotten lost in the
coverage of the widespread devastation hitting Texas, Florida, and now Puerto
Rico during an unusually intense start to the hurricane season.



It is troubling, however, how Senator Daines takes a
very complicated issue—the causes and consequences of wildfire—and lays blame
squarely on the shoulders of "radical environmentalists" and their lawsuits,
which he purports prevent efforts to clear and thin trees by forest managers.  If these lawsuits would only cease, writes
Daines, wildfires would be less intensive, less pervasive, and produce fewer
damaging greenhouse gases. And, perhaps as importantly, Montanans would have
more jobs as there would be more timber for mills to process into lumber. Stop
the lawsuits, and everyone would benefit!



Senator Daines was a champion debater in high school,
and like a skilled orator, he does his best to frame the facts to best advance
his core thesis. In so doing, he intentionally obscures or downplays the
biggest drivers of fire: temperature
and climate. At best, that's disingenuous. At worst,
it gives us false hope for the power of forest management in stemming the
effects of wildfire in the West.



Let's unpack just one point Senator Daines makes in
his article: the association between acres burned and declining timber
harvests. Daines tells us that "If you look at the
decline in timber harvests on National Forest land since 1990, you can't miss
the correlation between harvesting and wildfire. Harvests drastically declined
and, combined with the legal obstacles preventing the removal of fire
fuel, wildfires grew larger and more
severe. We have effectively increased the risk of wildfire by allowing
cluttered forest floors to build up with more material that can burn."



The logic seems crystal clear: Declining
timber harvests have increased fuel loads, which lead to more and more
intensive forest fires. The reason? Lawsuits from the aforementioned radical
environmentalists. And Senator Daines links to a study conducted by The Nature Conservancy
and the U.S. Forest Service in support of his claim that "an abundance of
science shows that a properly managed forest would reduce the size and severity
of wildfires." Stop the lawsuits, and we'll have better managed forests with
smaller and less severe wildfires, he argues.



If only it were so simple. This Sunday morning, MTN is airing a Face the State
devoted to the problem of fire in the West. I encourage you to tune in. In
preparing for the show, it was immediately apparent to me how complicated the
issue of fire is in the American West even if I am not a fire ecologist—or any
kind of ecologist.



But there's one thing I do know as a social
scientist—and it's something that Senator Daines surely knows, too, as an
engineer: Correlation does not equal causation. Senator Daines makes a causal
claim when he asks us to look at the correlation between timber harvests and
forest fire intensity. But simple bivariate relationships are not evidence that
X generates Y; indeed, these simple associations are often misleading without
having undergone a rigorous statistical analysis. (For a bit of fun, check out
this website (LINK)
devoted to correlations which are not causally related, such as the decline of
pirates and rising global temperatures or people falling and drowning in pools
and the release of Nicolas Cage movies). If I were to draw a causal conclusion
from these relationships, we should be able to fix global warming by issuing
more letters of marque or keeping Nicolas Cage away from the box office.
Clearly, that's absurd! And it is just as absurd to make forest policy based
upon two trends moving together without a deeper analysis controlling for other
factors.


Clearly, to address global warming, we need...Pirates!




Most troubling is that Senator Daines conspicuously
ignores two key factors in his opinion piece: climate and temperature.
According to fire ecologists and foresters, those are the key drivers of fire
intensity and growth—and forest management or lack thereof plays a much smaller
role (this recent
example). You would hardly know that, however, from reading
the Senator's article.  You also would
not know that fire is an essential part of a healthy Western forest which
requires its regenerative powers to remain in balance and even to allow certain
species to propagate (such as the ubiquitous lodge pole pine).



Finally, an abundance of science
clearly demonstrates that carbon emissions by humans is a
critical factor responsible for climate change which is leading to hotter and
drier summers in the West. To reduce the likelihood of the West burning, we
should pursue policies that would reduce those emissions. Senator Daines claims
that thinning our forests would reduce the release of dangerous greenhouse
gases, but has refused to acknowledge in this piece and elsewhere that carbonemissions from the burning of fossil fuels is responsible for precisely the
conditions most directly responsible for leaving our forests in cinders.



I could go on, as Dr. Diana Six of UM, a leading
expert on pine beetles,
has argued that thinning itself by pine beetles
helps our forests adapt to the new realities of a warming world and that
thinning by cuts might stymie an important natural process. Declining timber
yields in Montana have less to do with lawsuits and more to do with the free
market (lumber companies moving south where trees grow faster and wages are
lower) and unfair trade practices (government subsidies for timber in Canada)—here's
an extensive
report on the issue published in 2005.



Bottom line: There are no silver bullets when it comes
to fire in the West, and we need our elected officials to start leading an
honest discussion instead of providing us with false hope and convenient scape
goats for a problem that is much larger and messier than Senator Daines
suggests.