Author Michael Shellenberger explained during an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s program on Thursday that the massively destructive and deadly wildfires playing out near Los Angeles are laying bare decades of political malfeasance and mismanagement by a Democrat supermajority in the city and the state of California.

“I mean, who could have guessed that the people who were so anti-civilization would be so bad at maintaining civilization? I mean, this was completely preventable,” Shellenberger began.

“We knew that there were Santa Ana winds. We knew that there was huge fire risk. Many reports have been done on this,” he said. “We just saw there that helicopters actually do a pretty good job when they’re mobilized. Why weren’t they mobilized for the Pacific Palisades fire? Why wasn’t the National Guard mobilized earlier?

“Why did we not have enough water for the fire-pressurized levels in the fire hydrants? There’s many excuses that get made. People explain these things,” he continued. “They say, well, the reservoirs were full. There weren’t enough reservoirs. We haven’t had a significant water projects built since 1979.

“LA, as everyone knows, is right next to the ocean. So why don’t we have desalination plants like they have in Israel that work incredibly well, that would have been able to pump fresh water right from the oceans? So, I mean, look, it’s a catastrophe,” he noted further.

“People should be absolutely outraged about it. It is a direct consequence of what you were saying, this woke ideology. We saw voters who, making racialist assumptions, decided not to elect the white male candidate,” he said, a reference to the L.A. mayor’s race that saw Karen Bass, a black woman and former six-term congresswoman, defeat billionaire developer Rick Caruso in a close 2022 contest.

Shellenberger added: I saw focus groups where voters talked about they didn’t want to vote for the white male candidate, even though he was talking about increasing the Fire Department budget, whereas Mayor Karen Bass cut it. So, ultimately, we talk about these culture wars as though it doesn’t affect anything. I think we see the effect of the radical left’s culture war against civilization, against the United States, directly on the ground in Los Angeles.”