Comment by edge17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edge17 | Hacker News Reader

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Seeing as there is a lot or harangue and no data being presented, here is some data https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s42408-019-0041-0#...

In general, the study contends that the fires are fuel-dominated (too much forest) and not wind-dominated fires. It also contends that the California drought climate has contributed significantly to the problem.

> On the timber-rich interior US Forest Service (USFS) forests of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, anomalously large fuel loading due to a century of successful fire suppression and timber harvesting practices has been a dominant factor

The problem is likely too much forest at these level of droughts, so forest management bears some responsibility. Economically speaking though if PG&E has been given such a lucrative business opportunity as a sanctioned monopoly, they ought to be held responsible as well.

Also, the part that is not clear to me and I would appreciate if someone has an answer - speaking cynically, if PG&E as a private company causes damage and tax payers pay, and if PG&E as a state run company causes damage and tax payers pay, why do I care who runs it? Is it just that the prevailing politics in California is that corporate=bad and civic=good?

Under this approach, we would have to burn all of our natural forests down to the ground because of climate change. It will soon be too dry for any forest to be in it’s natural state. Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem, federal funds are required to manage federal lands. Especially since the current federal administration is fueling the onset of climate change like no other. I’ve witnessed the billions spent by PG&E in trimming trees away from these poles, but they should have spent a little more and gone the distance to just bury these lines underground. PG&E is a failed experiment. They have shown when confronted with the challenge of what’s best for the public and what’s best for the shareholders, they always choose the latter

That's not how natural dynamic systems work. There is a level of stability (some optimal level of forest) that the natural system wants to have, and it will naturally burn away excess if the people were not present. Much of the fires this year were caused by lightening (nature).

> Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem

Indeed it is not just a California problem. Believe it or not, there are other places in the country that do more controlled burns and manage fires better. The US Southeast burns nearly 2x the acreage as California on an annual basis.

> The US Southeast burns nearly 2x the acreage as California on an annual basis.

The US Southeast has a land area of 580,000mi², California is 163,000mi². So, just to be even as a proportion of land area, the former would need to burn 3.5 times the acreage of the latter on an annual basis. Unless your claim is that California’s problem is that its controlled burns are too extensive, I'm not sure what your point is.

Not sure what point you're making, but my point is there are individual smaller states in the US that do more prescribed burns by acreage than California. To name a few, Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina [1]

[1] https://assets.climatecentral.org/pdfs/May2019_Report_TheBur...

> my point is there are individual smaller states in the US that do more prescribed burns by acreage than California

Then you should have said that.

And, to the extent you believe that's a problem, you should probably address the entity that controls most forest land in California (and directly owns and excludes from state control almost half of the total land of the state.) Their executive HQ can be contacted at:

  The White House
  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
  Washington, DC 20500

Yeah, I know President Trump likes to say the problem is California not “raking forests”, and his cult-like followers just echo his propaganda with some light editing of wording and interjection of random tangential factoids to give it a veneer of rationality, but the bottom line is that, like most of the West and unlike the US outside of the West, California land management, and even moreso California forest management, is predominantly a federal issue, from which the state is excluded from much of due to the Supremacy Clause.

The natural systems are out of wack, my point is that the way the earth is heating up, we would eventually need to burn every forest to compensate for the growing temperatures. This stance is ridiculous. I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have such ravaging fires, and lightning happened all the time. Better yet, scientists can look at past patterns and they too have proved that climate change is real. Ask a firefighter who’s been around for more then 30 years, they will tell you. The belief that Trump is even remotely correct on this issue is to believe complete foolishness. Alas, here we are.

Forest management is in conflict with home ownership and building code in the forests, and it's sufficiently complicated that what's happening is the only way forward. What support is there to say private land ownership within forests: federal, state, and BLM land? If there were no private land ownership, there'd be no political resistance to controlled burns, there'd be no demand to put out fires immediately. The instant humans started to build in these areas, their rights directly lead to the changes in natural state of the forests.

There are similar problems with homes on beaches and in flood plains. Not only is private home ownership allowed, it's federally subsidized via the National Flood Insurance program.

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