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Comment by ArlenBales | Hacker News Reader

I think population growth is the main factor for why prescribed burns of forests have dwindled. We have cities and towns that have expanded into forests and high-risk fire areas. Maybe we shouldn't have ever allowed this, but it happened, and now we're stuck with it (good luck getting people to move out).

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> Maybe we shouldn't have ever allowed this, but it happened, and now we're stuck with it (good luck getting people to move out).

They will move out when they can’t insure their properties anymore. [1] Note the refusal to cover properties isn’t a blanket withdrawal; I got a call from State Farm just last week - but I live in a major metro.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/california-insurance-mar...

I mean that's only happening because California made it illegal to charge the real risk adjusted price for insurance. The companies weren't going to start losing money on every home in CA so they are leaving.

> California made it illegal to charge the real risk adjusted price for insurance

I'd like to know more about this. Do you have a reference?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_California_Proposition_...

California is a great example of direct democracy being a terrible idea in most cases.

California is a great example of being terrible in most cases.

No, it’s a great example of demographics is destiny. It’s filled with old rich people who struck gold (prop 13, tech, show biz etc..).

But also the most beautiful state, if you get off on that sort of thing.

I think there was another HN thread the other day saying this is how CA can depopulate the risk-prone regions - CA refuses real risk pricing yet carriers refuse uncovered risk, so high risk areas become depopulated as they can't be insured, and thus, not in compliance with loan requirements.

Once this is accomplished (as ugly as it might be for the residents) then you can possibly do some forest management and fire control.

This same thing is playing out in FL, but over there the insurance commission isn't as stringent so insurers are just flat out not paying claims.

How does that actually get people to stop living there?

Suppose you can't get insurance and you can't get a mortgage without insurance. The house still exists. Its value will crash. But having crashed, now someone can afford to buy it without a loan. Meanwhile there is still a massive housing shortage, so somebody will.

And that's the thing that caused this, and the only way out of it. You have to build enough housing in the areas that aren't in the direct path of wildfires that nobody is being forced by those high prices into the housing that is.

A house without any neighbors, in a bankrupt city or unincorporated area that's also a food desert sounds like a non-starter to 99% of the people on the plant.

Meanwhile CA also recently revamped how local regulators are allowed to regulate things like more duplexes and multiplexes in all residential areas.

But the neighboring houses are still there too, and as long as people live there, so will there be grocery stores etc.

That may be true in California. In northern Canada there are very few populated places, I believe these are mostly in complete wilderness

Environmental fashion became obsessed with trees as 'the lungs of the planet' despite ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath.

We have been conditioned to believe humans are destroying the fragile planet but ironically the reality is that we are increasingly irresponsible stewards of it, flying in the face of thousands of years of evidence.

Well, that plancton will die off, when the oceans get accidic.. so it will be the trees only in the long run.

We're killing the phytoplankton too.

https://medium.com/climate-conscious/how-the-loss-of-phytopl...

> ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath.

This is not true.

Ocean photosynthesis produces about 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, but ocean respiration also consumes about the same amount. The oceans are about oxygen neutral. Same goes for the other 50%, but in land ecosystems.

https://theconversation.com/humans-will-always-have-oxygen-t...

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankto...

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html

'Phytoplankton are responsible for most of the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean. Carbon dioxide is consumed during photosynthesis, and the carbon is incorporated in the phytoplankton, just as carbon is stored in the wood and leaves of a tree'.

The air we breathe is processed by Phytoplankton

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Phytoplankton#:~:....

A higher percentage of the global population lives in urban areas than pretty much any time before. Population growth isn't causing sprawl.

It is in the US, where the "urban" label is applied to suburban and exurban places.

It's not really population pressure causing that though, at least not exclusively. It's a relatively small number of people that think they want a particular sort of lifestyle. Net migration patterns more or less have people moving out of low population counties and into high population counties.

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