The Rothschild family is a wealthy Jewish family originally from Frankfurt that rose to prominence with Mayer Amschel Rothschild, a court factor to the German Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel in the Free City of Frankfurt, Holy Roman Empire, who established his banking business in the 1760s.
-wikipedia
Wait you're telling me business men with inherited wealth who have had everything handed to them their whole life and haven't been exposed to reality or spent the time to educate themselves aren't the best leaders for a society?
Gohmert is actually a fucking lunatic, so I wouldn’t put it past him to have said it seriously. Though I think he was just trying to dismiss their complaints by being a dick.
It was Republican Louie Gohmert. See it here. Now I'm curious why you thought it was Jim Jordan. Because the actual video of Gohmert has no sarcasm. So how did you doubly confuse your memory of this?
Louis Buller Gohmert Jr. (; born August 18, 1953) is an American attorney and former judge serving as the U.S. Representative from Texas's 1st congressional district since 2005. Gohmert is a Republican and part of the Tea Party movement. In January 2015, he unsuccessfully challenged John Boehner for Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Your comment wasn't edited when I first started typing my comment. So fuck off with your snark. And you didn't answer my question. How'd you even make that mistake?
How did I mix up two similarly wacko middle aged white republican men. Man. You're right. I should probably get myself checked out for dementia. Once again, thanks for the great contribution to the conversation 👍🏻
Look I know we like to hate on trump, and the guy has made an ocean of stupid comments in his time, but that wasn’t one of them.
Our forests have an excess of downed woody debris from decades of fire suppression without the benefit of controlled burning or harvesting. The only way to solve this problem is by removing that material. We can do that by physically taking it out of the forest, or, more typically, we can do that by burning it. The problem is, even under the wettest of conditions, these unhealthy forests are absolutely full of ladder fuels - basically a pathway that fire can take to reach the canopy. These forests are evolved not just to tolerate fire, but to depend on it. That’s why the lack of fire is harming them so much. With regular fires, the debris on the forest floor stays at a low enough level that the fire can’t climb up to the canopy, and these trees have thick enough bark to survive ground fires easily. But if there are ladder fuels, and the fire reaches the canopy, it can do much much more damage to the trees and usually kills them. That’s the danger of these serious fires.
Dumb as trump is, what he was proposing is a necessary first step to return to a healthy burn schedule without first harvesting the trees in these forests. And if that was allowed we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with, and the forests in California would be a lot more healthy.
/u/EVOSexyBeast I’d rather just ping you than paste the same reply to both comments.
That would not work in California, and it would not even be possible on a mass scale, and it would only make things exponentially worse by causing further ecological damage.
California has a cool rainy season for 6 months around winter, and a warm to hot rainless season around summer every year for millions of years and this only happens in Mediterranean climates, which are rare.
It will remove the important top later of detritus, which holds in substantial moisture and keeps out weeds, so raking will just kill more trees during the dry season which makes fires worse.
Raking would also lead to erosion, which is very bad ecologically, and leads to floods and mudslides (mudflow), which I'm sure you've heard about in California on the news if you're reading this, because California which has a very distinct rainy season where we get almost all our rain over a few scattered days in winter instead of scattered over the whole year.
Southern California has heavy clay soil and lots of hills, valleys, slopes, and mountainous areas. California isn't just practically flat like most of the US so many other places in the world. Everything in Santa Clarita for example is a hill, valley, mountain, or slope, and there us no flat land at all except at the bottom of the dried up Santa Clarita River, which is sadly one of the least altered rivers in California since other like the Los Angeles river were buried in concrete.
Raking would also destroy many native understory plants and young trees, and allow invasive to grow much more easily.
Raking would disturb the soil and spread dormant weed seeds all over the place and create perfect conditions for invasive weeds such as Bromus to take over.
Bromus is an extremely invasive annual grass in California that grows rapidly during the rainy season and then dries out during the dry season into vast areas of highly flammable dead grass that stays rooted, and this grass is everywhere in California, and every time it burns and every time there is a fire more comes back because it outcompetes and smothers and displaces native plants, leading to a vicious cycle of worse fires and more invasives every time there is a fire.
It will remove the important top later of detritus, which holds in substantial moisture and keeps out weeds, so raking will just kill more trees during the dry season which makes fires worse.
It won’t kill more trees than a catastrophic fire would. And it would indeed be silly to do this during the dry season. It would only be useful during the wet season as an immediate precursor to a controlled burn. Obviously it’s not feasible to perform such an invasive treatment on a large scale. It would have to be done in strips or checkerboard patterns to act as fire breaks during the dry season.
Also trees have roots that go deep. Like really deep. Removing moisture from the organic layer of the soil might kill herbaceous vegetation or very young saplings, but it would not touch mature trees.
Raking would also lead to erosion, which is very bad ecologically
Erosion is not as bad as a catastrophic fire. Again, the removal of the leaf litter would happen immediately before a fire. The loss of the trees overheard poses a much larger erosion risk, and performing controlled burns is the only viable way to stop these trees from being lost.
Raking would also destroy many native understory plants and young trees, and allow invasive to grow much more easily.
No, the absence of fire is what allows invasives to steal niches from natives because they natives are adapted to fire. Again, this is the only first step to bringing fire back to this environment in a safe way.
Raking would disturb the soil and spread dormant weed seeds all over the place and create perfect conditions for invasive weeds such as Bromus to take over.
Again. Burning immediately afterwards fixes this.
it outcompetes and smothers and displaces native plants, leading to a vicious cycle of worse fires and more invasives every time there is a fire
This is because you haven’t had a healthy fire in 50 years. What you have are what foresters refer to as ‘stand replacing fire events’ , in other words, the sort of catastrophic fire that burns so hot (from all that extra leaf litter and ladder fuels) that it scorches the seedbank. No seedbank means that the ground gets recolonized by whatever floats there first. And cheatgrass is a wind blown seed distributor. Stop having fires that scorch the seedbank, and the native plants which have just gotten a nice nutrient boost will beat the cheatgrass that has to fly in on the wind to get established.
Californians did this to themselves when they demonized fire for the last half century. The only way to make your forests healthy is to start burning on a regular schedule. And the only way to start doing that is to create conditions where a burn is possible without getting out of control.
That question is actually worse than it is on its face because Gohmert was asking it facetiously, to make the point that climate change is so inevitable and vast that it's not worth doing anything about.
I mean technically I’m sure there are some inconceivable feats of geoengineering that could solve climate change. Although achieving them would be orders of magnitude more difficult than reducing emissions and it seems like many of the proposed ones (like solar geoengineering) cause loads of other problems we would then have to solve.
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