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Comment by sologoub | Hacker News Reader

In california you also have to deal with CARB (Air Resource Board) and get allocated burn days. They are so few that even when conditions allow no burns happen because of this logistical nightmare: https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-he...

Firefighting resources are already stretched thin. Adding more bureaucracy on top of these tough logistics make any preventative burns impossible to plan since CARB can just deny it the last minute.

CARB performs a useful function (acid rain anyone?), but if you asked most people in CA, I suspect wildfires will come in a lot higher on the list than smog from occasional burns. With uncontrolled fires, even more smoke and who knows what else goes into the air already.

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I’m sorry I have but one upvote to give, but those who aren’t local don’t seem to have any notion of how stringent environmental and air quality regulations are in California in this arena.

Nobody wants the LA smog of the 1970s back, but controlled burns are largely impossible much of the year due to their effects on air quality.

Wildland firefighters - of whom I count several among my cousins - are between a rock and a hard place on this issue. They spend more of each year in “fire season” in part because they cannot pollute the air during “not fire season” with controlled burns.

Thank you and your family for their service and protection to all of us!!!

Hopefully one day we get a study that shows the fires end up spewing even more pollutants than any controlled burn, so the net effect of not doing these controlled burns is likely a lot worse.

Of course they are too chicken shit to take more aggressive action against the real emissions problem: cars.

Allowing new pollution spewing gas guzzlers to continue to be produced and sold until 2035 is absurd. They should ban production in 5 years and ban use by 2035.

> ban use by 2035

For personal vehicles that would hit the sector of population least able to afford an EV. Incentives and cash for clunkers type programs work better than forcing a financial burden on folks.

The other problem is that we don’t yet have good alternative to heavy diesel trucks. Sweden is experimenting with some cool options and we need a similar infra investment: https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/05/09/sweden-is-building-... and https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...

The problem is that the last article is from 2016. All the investment is still going to long battery ranges and such, when if we built infra like this, trucking companies would switch due to much lower costs.

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