They've intended to do this consistently, but confounding factors like air quality guidelines have prevented them from keeping up with the required rate of controlled burns.

I can't recall exactly how far behind they are, but if they're permitted to put aside those constraints (unlikely) it'll still take decades at this point.

Yep, it's a terrible article.

Yep, I find most of the discussion around it profoundly uninformed. California averages (corrected 127 thousand) --1.8Million-- acres of prescribed burns a year. They were happening in the 1980s and 90s (when there were mistakes that cost lives), and have been since the 1870s. Unfortunately, the list of prescribed burns is now only available from ARCGIS and the simple list appears gone: https://data.ca.gov/dataset/prescribed-burns

Here's a paper published in 2020.

https://www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/3/3/44 Prescribed Burns in California: A Historical Case Study of the Integration of Scientific Research and Policy

It's a complex issue so there's lots of reasons why prescribed burns aren't done more, but they have been done for years, and there are new laws to make it easier. The challenges include: Air Quality Laws, Insurance Liability, Federal control of National Forest, and the high population in the Wildland Urban Interface and large number of houses near areas that need fire control. People do build houses in areas called Devil's Canyon and Black Hill, but at the same time large areas of grass and scrub have burned annually each year in Lake County so burns there obviously don't help.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-s...

Every article seems like a chance to spread misinformation with lazy analysis and conspiracy theories about Jewish Space Lasers, Climate Change Denial, or that controlled burns haven't been part of California fire control for all of living memory.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/10/28/fac...