The McClintock Interview: Covid Mandates, Energy, Forest Fires

As public officials in California and Washington D.C. are signaling there could be more Covid mask mandates and lockdowns may be coming (coinciding with the fall midterm elections), even as “the rest of the world has accepted the endemic nature of Covid and moved on,” according to Johns Hopkins physician Dr. Marty Makary, California Congressman Tom McClintock (R) recently shared some strong words and warnings.

Rep. McClintock met with the Globe and discussed his concerns, which he also presented in a recent floor speech in Congress.

McClintock compares the handling of Covid to the Emperor’s New Clothes, and the shameless grifters who convince an emperor that they’re expert tailors who weave a cloth so fine that only the virtuous can see it.

“The emperor wraps himself in nothing and parades the streets as all the townspeople compete to signal their own virtue by proclaiming how beautiful the material is – even though their own common sense tells them otherwise.  This scheme is successful until a little boy who knows better states the obvious.”

“For two years, we were told by the experts that they could stop Covid-19, if everyone did exactly as they commanded.  “I AM science,” as one put it.  They quashed debate within the medical community and ridiculed, censored and fired any dissenters.  Looking back, we can clearly see what a self-destructive folly they produced.  Study after study now confirms the obvious: that the mask mandates, school closures, home detention orders and business closures had virtually no impact on the virus, but they did appalling damage to the economy, seriously harmed children in ways we are still cataloging, and cost untold lives due to suicides, drug and alcohol overdoses, delayed health screenings and treatments and poverty related deaths.”

The Lack of Necessary Energy

The Congressman pivoted into the strange and disconnected policies and mandates the Biden administration, as well as California’s supermajority have over attempting to eliminate fossil fuels while mandating more and more electric cars.

“Joe Biden and the Democrats promised to wage war on fossil fuels, and they have succeeded.  On his first day in office, he cancelled the Keystone Pipeline, which should today have been completed and be delivering 830,000 barrels of oil a day into American markets.  He cancelled oil and gas exploration on federal lands.  Just last month, he withdrew one million acres of land from exploration and production in oil-rich Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

And he blames Vladimir Putin?”

McClintock said under the pro-growth policies of the Trump Administration, because America was energy independent for the first time in our life-times, we didn’t need Russian oil. “We were producing more oil than Russia and even Saudi Arabia,” he said. “The day the Democrats took office, gasoline was averaging $2.39 a gallon.”

We also discussed another strange disconnect – ethanol. “Acreage once devoted to growing corn for food is now used to produce ethanol,” McClintock said. He noted that it takes 1-acre of corn for just 551 gallons of ethanol, and said that with the food shortages because of the Ukraine/Russia was, burning up food to put into the gas tank is ridiculous and reckless.

The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) was created by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The RFS, administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, sets annual volumes of biofuels that must be blended into the fuel supply. Gasoline blenders can either meet their quotas by blending ethanol, or they can buy ethanol blending credits called RINs (renewable identification numbers), Robert Rapier at Forbes wrote. He sums lip the ethanol situation as “mandates create an industry reliant on mandates.”

“At a time when these green new deal policies can’t guarantee enough electricity to keep the lights on this summer – at any price – these Democrat elitists are telling families to buy electric cars,” McClintock said. “Where do they think the electricity for their electric cars comes from?  Eighty percent comes from fossil fuels – that they are ruthlessly shutting down.”

It is indeed ruthless. In California, the aggressive push by the Newsom administration and the left to have the states’ drivers trade out of internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, comes at a time when energy providers implore electric car owners not to recharge their car batteries with looming rolling blackouts.

The excuse for all of this, McClintock said, is to stop global warming. “But they cannot account for why it is that there have been periods throughout paleo history when temperatures have been much higher – and much lower – than they are today.  Nor do they account for the infinitely more powerful natural forces that shape our constantly changing climate. The earth will continue to warm and cool for millennia,” McClintock added.

Forest Fires

Yosemite National Park, which is in McClintock’s congressional district, currently suffers yet another wildfire – the Washburn Fire. The now-1,500-acre fire broke out Thursday in the Mariposa Grove – home to more than 500 mature giant sequoias, according to a statement at the Yosemite Fire and Aviation Facebook page.

“The fire is burning in difficult terrain with continuous heavy dead and down fuels in and around the fire,” the statement says. “Tree mortality from 2013 – 2015 has left significant dead standing and dead fallen fuels.”

Reps. McClintock and Doug LaMalfa introduced legislation in March directing the U.S. Forest Service to immediately suppress wildfires on National Forest System lands and put an end to the policy of letting fires burn.

“This ‘let burn’ policy of federal land managers began in 1972, during the height of the radical environmental movement,” McClintock said. “Essentially, it holds that ‘fire is our friend.’ It stems from the premise that fire is nature’s way of cleaning up forests, and that active suppression of fires leads to a build-up of excess fuels. As we have tragically witnessed firsthand, it is dangerous nonsense to ‘monitor’ incipient fires in today’s forest tinderbox. The U.S. Forest Service was formed to remove excess growth before it can burn and to preserve our forests in a healthy condition from generation to generation. It’s time they did.”

McClintock and LaMalfa sent a letter to Chief of the U.S. Forest Service Randy Moore urging him to implement these policies for the upcoming wildfire season – ahead of the latest Yosemite fire, but not soon enough to put their proposal into action.

McClintock told the Globe he was going to be visiting Yosemite with a House delegation for a close-up experience of the need for preventative forest management. His visit was just days ahead of the breakout of the latest forest fire.

Today, I’m at Yosemite National Park in CA-04 with my House colleagues where we discussed preserving the park for future generations. A key to making this goal a reality is restoring active forest management practices to prevent the threat of catastrophic wildfire. pic.twitter.com/fvVLbBBZwF

— Tom McClintock (@RepMcClintock) July 6, 2022

“The blind reliance on handpicked experts and the suppression of dissent in our approach to Covid cost lives and destroyed the most prosperous economic expansion in our lifetimes,” McClintock said. “But its excesses pale in comparison with what the Green Left is now doing to our society. The pain and damage we are feeling today is just the first bitter taste of what is to come if they prevail.”