California on fire
 |
| Screen capture of a scene in Blade Runner. Just kidding. It was a scene in the parking lot of my office complex. No filters added or any post-processing. // photo my own |
It went to such intensity that San Francisco had a day that looked like a scene in a post-apocalyptic movie. As soon as I reached the office, I wish I had taken the day off to take photos across the Bay Area. Smoke from the fire even reached New York.
Publications were quick to blame climate change, as usual. They make some good points, where dry summers occur sooner and end later, creating a wider timeframe of dry brush.
Still, that's somewhat like focusing all our attention on the engine instead of the battery when the car doesn't start one night when we're trying to get home from work.
Even if the engine has been sputtering, what can we do about it when stuck in a parking lot? Not really much at all. But we can check the battery level and get a jump pretty easily. Nobody automatically jumps to deciding it's the engine and starts taking it apart with the one screwdriver in the glove compartment. Why would we do that in this case?
Why ignore the obvious easy remedy? Controlled burns need to happen at a far high rate.
This is something I've known since the fourth grade, for crying out loud, when my environmentalist teacher mentioned it in passing while talking about preventing forest fires. I remember because my fourth-grade mind was going, "Set fires to prevent fires? Does not compute."
I've grown since. Apparently, the government has regressed since.
Controlled burns were something the country has known about since at least the 1960s when stopping fires at all costs had made wildfires worse. Hell, the Native Americans knew about controlled burns centuries ago. Yet, California has significantly reduced controlled burns since my fourth-grade class.
Why?
For one, enter the Clean Air Act with amendments in 1990, governed by the EPA.
The Clean Air Act gives federal bureaucrats the authority to approve and deny controlled burns on the basis of keeping the air clean and to stave off climate change. Every controlled burn requires reams of documentation, analysis, and studies (hey, just like building houses in California!). After these long, laborious studies that produce multi-thousand-page documents, projects will just get put on hold for long periods of time as special interests file lawsuits (hey, just like building houses in California!).
The Clean Air Act treats all controlled burns as a polluting activity whereby the smoke, particulates, and emissions of each burn must be analyzed. When regulators don't compare this to the alternative, which is hellish wildfires, they make things worse than they have to be, leaving a wake of bodies in their churning of red tape. When controlled burns aren't done, natural fuels aggregate to dangerous levels where a lightning storm, PG&E power line, cigarette butt, or two humping porcupines can create a spark and ignite a massive three million acre wildfire.
What's more destructive? Controlled burns done every year where fuels are partially burned away, or massive wildfires that gobble up every fuel source on the ground for miles, forever destroying ecosystems in the state? It should surprise me that people in the 1960s knew more about this than politicians and environmental groups today, but it doesn't.
Academics estimate that in prehistoric California, 4.4-11.8 million acres burned every year, nature's way of keeping wildfires in check. Fast forward to the late 20th century, a whopping 30,000 acres were burned by government land management between 1982 and 1998. From 1999 to 2017, the number more than halved to 13,000 acres. The journal Nature Sustainability estimated that California needs to burn 20 million acres to stabilize wildfire threats. A report by Little Hoover Commission concurs, recommending 1.1 million acres over twenty years. But CalFire won't even just let low-risk fires burn through some fuel, opting instead to douse them as soon as possible.
A look at the differing forests that are burning now reveals that those forests that are managed well with controlled burns do, in fact, fare much better. As the high-intensity fires spread into well-managed forests like the one managed by Southern California Edison, the fires there are only low-intensity fires and much easier to contain. How do they get through the Clean Air Act? I can't find anything on it, unfortunately. They could just be more persistent and streamlined about it than other agencies. Like in housing, some developers are more persistent, litigious, or have better political connections than others. Perhaps the ownership of the land changes the law's applicability. Again like with housing, public land to be developed have certain strings attached that private sales don't. But I'm just stabbing in the dark here about the reasons. If I were a real journalist, I might call Southern California Edison. Then again, many "real" journalists haven't even reported on the lack of controlled burns and hardly any on the Clean Air Act.
At any rate, the law is pretty clearly adversely affecting most of the open space and forests in California. Loosening the regulations so prescribed burns can increase as well as changing fire policy to allow naturally started fires to burn through instead of immediately putting the fires out are relatively easy steps to take. I mean, how much easier does it get than to not do anything except watch and evaluate when there is a low-risk fire? How hard is it to remove layers of bureaucracy so fire agencies don't have to submit thousands of pages reports per controlled burn? How hard is it for environmental groups to not file lawsuits that make the situation worse? All I'm asking for is for certain people (government agencies) to do less. I just want legislation that intends to ease climate change to be repealed when it becomes obvious that it exacerbates climate change and ruins lives in the process. It's a hell of a lot easier than trying to figure out how to end climate change, so let's just do this in the meantime.
But that is apparently too hard to do. So we'll just watch the state effectively pile oily rags into mountainous heaps and light cigarettes nearby so we can, once in a while, enjoy a day where the air quality gets so bad that one expects a young Charlton Heston to come around on horseback and scream, "Damn you all to hell!"
This all seems so obvious, but rarely anybody reports on it. Nearly every national publication instantly pounces on "climate change!", but few talk about controlled burns, and almost nobody about the Clean Air Act's effect on those controlled burns. A Google search turns up some hits on controlled burns but several times less than climate change. For the Clean Air Act's hand in it, it's pretty much just Reason Magazine.
Maybe next time our car doesn't start, let's start by checking the battery and getting a jump. We can try to diagnose and fix the engine when we have more tools at our disposal, but at least the first method gets us on the road for the time being.
