The Biden administration and the governor of Hawaii claim it did.
ABC News throws some water on this theory:
Not only do “fire hurricanes” not exist, but climate change can’t be blamed for the number of people who died in the wildfires.
Globally, climate change “nudged” the conditions that contribute to making wildfires more severe, but it is unclear how much of a role that played in the Maui fire event, Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told ABC News.
Moreover, wildfires have the “lowest confidence” among natural disasters that researchers attribute to climate change, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“We should not look to the Maui wildfires as a poster child of the link to climate change,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Friday in a YouTube stream. . . .
The weather and environmental factors involved with the Maui wildfire event are more complex, Swain said. Natural climate variability in Hawaii is very large and picking out the human-induced climate change signs is really difficult, Abby Frazier, a climatologist at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, told ABC News.
Later, you find out that “the main factor driving the fires involved the invasive grasses that cover huge parts of Hawaii, which are extremely flammable.”
What caused the fire in the first place? Likely a spark from Hawaiian Electric’s poorly protected power lines. That’s the same power company that invested in a green-energy transition rather than wildfire protection. The Wall Street Journal reports:
During the 2019 wildfire season, one of the worst Maui had ever seen, Hawaiian Electric concluded that it needed to do far more to prevent its power lines from emitting sparks.
The utility examined California’s plans to reduce fires ignited by power lines, started flying drones over its territory and vowed to take steps to protect its equipment and its customers from the threat of fire.
Nearly four years later, the company has completed little such work. . . .
At the end of 2019, Hawaiian Electric issued a press release about wildfire risk. It said it would install heavier, insulated conductors on Maui and Oahu to minimize the risk of sparks when winds picked up, as well as technology to detect disruptions when the conductors came into contact with vegetation or each other. It said it would apply fire retardant on poles in risky areas and consider installing cameras and other devices to monitor weather conditions during fire season.
In filings over the next two years with the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission, which is tasked with approving utility projects and spending, the company made only passing reference to wildfire mitigation.
And then there is this:
Former regulators and energy company officials said the utility was focused at that time on procuring renewable energy. Hawaii has been on a push to convert to renewables since 2008, when a run-up in oil prices sent electrical rates at Hawaiian Electric—which relied on petroleum imports for 80% of its energy supply—through the roof. In 2015, lawmakers passed legislation mandating that the state derive 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2045, the first such requirement in the U.S. …
“Looking back with hindsight, the business opportunities were on the generation side, and the utility was going out for bid with all these big renewable-energy projects,” he said. “But in retrospect, it seems clear, we weren’t as focused on these fire risks as we should have been.”