Welcome back in Clay Travis, Buck Sexton's show. Appreciate all of you hanging out with us.

We've been talking about what I think is just a scary situation, but also a sign of what can happen when you begin to reverse progress.

When you go from, as Congressman Tom McClintock points out driving down in a massive

way the amount of wildfire acres that are being consumed in California and then you start to

reverse all the policies that had helped to make that such a huge success.

And we're joined now by the author of that Wall Street Journal editorial, Congressman Tom McClintock,

from the 5th Congressional District in California. Congressman Clintock, appreciate you coming on

with us. Great piece this morning.

How frustrating is it to look at the data and do your deep dive on what's been going on with California wildfires?

As you lay out, this is a historical reality. Four and a5 million on average acres a year have burned since the 1,500s in California.

Due to smart policies, that number gets driven back down to 250,000.

And then as you lay out, new decisions are made that reverse many of those successful policies.

And here we are.

California can't put out of fire.

And there are a lot more of them than there used to be.

Well, exactly right.

Fire is how nature gardens.

And nature's a lousy gardener.

If you doubt that for a second, just leave your own alone for a few years and tell me what it's going to

look like nature removes excess growth by by catastrophic fire

beginning in the 20th century we adopted policies to do the gardening

ourselves we we auctioned off excess timber to logging companies

...