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Comment by stcroixx | Hacker News Reader

The only federal regulation I saw referenced in the article were clean air regulations. Otherwise, it appears states and their residents are imposing additional barriers. And public opinion is a local issue of course as well. I don't know if it's really possible to change public ignorance, particularly if the strong opinions are political, so this might be a case where it makes sense for the federal government to step in. We can't just let CO decide to burn themselves to the ground without that decision putting other states at risk.

Controlled burns happen regularly in NC on state and federal land.

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It's something even more fundamental than all that.

If someone does a prescribed burn (say, a local government), and it gets even slightly out of control and accidentally burns down a few homes, they will immediately face a huge amount of blame and consequences and probably get run out on a rail. But if they don't do a prescribed burn and then the inevitable wildfire burns down a bunch of homes, well then, tough luck. That's just an unlucky act of god.

Ultimately it's a trolley problem.

Doesn't a controlled burn work by removing a swath of combustible material, so that a subsequent fire cannot cross that area? That material can be removed by other means that don't risk fire.

Yes that's exactly the idea. And yes those "other means" sometimes exist, but they tend to be much more expensive than controlled burns. The amount of person-power and time needed to remove that material manually would be cost-prohibitive.

And that's assuming other methods even exist. Much of the fuel that needs to be removed is in places where there are no roads, so the only way to remove that fuel would be hundreds or thousands of individual helicopter trips. No government is going to pay for that.

EDIT: Methods like tree thinning are manual methods and they are done routinely and they help. But they cannot take the place of controlled burns for removing large amounts of fuel and creating big fire breaks.

"Cannot" is a strong word. Fires smoulder for a long time and you cannot control the wind. It would be foolish to expect a prescribed burn to have zero chance of causing collateral damage.

Controlled burns are optimal, but not Pareto optimal.

This was my first thought as well. The title should be "Regulations make them nearly impossible [in Colorado]"

It's not Colorado's land to burn, though. Most of the issue is fuels load on federally-managed land.

This quirk of the west should really be addressed. The feds “own” far too much of the western US.

The federal government is infinitely better than some local government selling it off to pad their budget for a year or two. Tragedy of the commons.

Uhh, no. Fed just needs to relax regulations around air quality, especially when the thing they're saying no to will improve air quality in the long run. I recreate on our federal lands and can't imagine the same access in state or private hands. State ownership inevitably leads to valuing extraction activities over recreation activities, if not just selling it to the highest bidder (Wilkes Brothers) directly.

At least with the states imposing regulations it's limited to that state. I don't see how Colorado effects neighboring states that presumably are doing what they are supposed to do. If Wyoming is running controlled burns but Colorado is not, then (admittedly in this very simple thought) the fires will be more easily contained because they have done their diligence.

The citizens of that state should step in and make the changes, not the federal government.

Good state enjoyer. Thank you for acknowledging the role of the states over the feds.

If CO continues on their path, their fires will go out of control and spread to other states. If they had a way to contain their fires within their state I’d agree to let them burn it down if that’s what they want to do, but I don’t see how that isn’t a major problem for all their neighboring states. Even if their neighbors are smart and doing prescribes burns as they should, it doesn’t mean they can’t suffer massive losses from a huge out of control fire started in another state.

There isn't really much of anything around the Colorado borders to burn.

> Even if their neighbors are smart and doing prescribes burns as they should, it doesn’t mean they can’t suffer massive losses from a huge out of control fire started in another state.

These sorts of issues usually wind up in court, in which the circuit court would then certainly have the ability to force CO into acting properly. WY would just need to show that there was indeed damage. States fighting happens all the time (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-state_water_dispute for example), but rarely does it need to become a federal issue.

> it appears states and their residents are imposing additional barriers

As long as the states imposing the barriers are bearing their own costs, I don't see reason for federal intervention. The situation gets complicated in the West, because a lot of the forest is federal.

> I don't know if it's really possible to change public ignorance,

Let me clear that up for you, no, it is not possible. Society is suffering willful ignorance in so many aspects of day-to-day life that this is not going to change in our lifetimes if ever.

Most of the land West of the Mississippi is Federally owned. You wanna do fire abatement on BLM land, you got a long hard fight ahead of you, before you ever get to a written regulation you can cite. Much less laws voted on by Congress.

Source for obsctruction from the BLM? As far as I can tell, they carry out controlled burns all the time (what they call "prescribed burning"): https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/files/blm/documents/BLMFi...

Thanks for the update, I was near some of the early lawsuits against the BLM to allow controlled burns back in the 90s; and haven't kept up with it much since then.

BLM = Bureau of Land Management.

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