climate change makes a difference at the margin but the sheer number of recent events has a lot more to do with how we manage our forests/urban upscaling.
It's not. In California, we've been discussing forest management for at least 25 years since a series of wildfires broke out. There have been plenty of discussions about how we should be managing forests, trying to build consensus around best practices, and building the political will to implement them. It's been a maddeningly slow process.
If anyone is coming into the conversation out here saying, "California has bad forest management, they need to rake the forest floors" or whatever, it shows that they're entering the conversation with at best a 1990s mindset of what modern forest management is like. Yeah, we know, that alarm has been clanging for 25+ years. Come at us with solutions, not problems, we know the problems.
This excerpt of the last week tonight show 90 year old electric line equipment responsible for fires : https://youtu.be/qBpiXcyB7wU?feature=shared&t=515
I don't pretend to know anything and I don't know how common this is but it is pretty concerning and I wonder if anything has been done about that.
The utility repeatedly plants stories about how much they are doing, and how expensive upgrades are, in the public media as a reflexive PR device and that is what is being repeated, apparently
upgrades are expensive, PG&E is barely profitable, and it operates in a very challenging regulatory environment. California liability law + juries impose extremely outsized liability judgements compared to the rest of the country... other utilities have caused actions that lead to death but it generally does not mean billions of dollars in liability judgement. Compare the West fertilizer explosion in Texas, the liability it generated, with PG&E liability judgements.
I understand that it is always attractive to have a simple explanatory story with a clear villain. I encourage you to resist that appeal.
[0]: https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fast-moving-wildfires-... [1]: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/12/2296400/-Critics-... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/09/los-angel...
"Windy" doesn't begin to describe winds over 100km/h on a dry and warm(ish) day in an drought. You could probably bulldoze a two hundred metre barrier in front of a bushfire on a day like that and it would still spread from uncontrollable spot fires ahead of the front. I'm not sure any forestry practices could do much against it.
Are strong winds directly caused by climate change? Sure, extreme weather events are more common, but it's impossible to say whether any given event would have happened anyway. Reversing climate change might make really bad days less frequent, but it's no more capable of eradicating them than good forestry.
Okay, whatever.
Forest service people have tried educating the public about how new forests have a different set of issues - high density, uncleared dead wood, pests spreading easily, and all that. But no one amplifies those points because it is politically inconvenient. It’s also incredible how little money is spent on access roads, fire breaks, properly located reservoirs, firefighting aircraft, power line management, and so forth given how large state and federal budgets are.