This feels reductive and unlikely to help. Would you allow your neighbor to do a controlled burn of leaves in their yard against your fence? It is easy to see a straight line from that concept to this. Turns out, rule making is hard.
I'm joyed when my neighbor does it, because we do it to keep dried leaves off each other's property precisely to prevent fires in summer and make the same job easier next year. I'd rather burn my leaves to save my house.
That is, i picked that example not because you can't burn in your yard, but because there are rules you have to follow. Doing it "at large" in a full state will clearly have more difficulties than doing it in your small yard.
Yes, this is extremely common in the south east.
Literally, the point is they are building a fund so that prescribed burning can be insured.
Edit: I should say that I'm playing loose here, as this is a conversation, not a debate. That said, I did include the "against your fence" on purpose. I'm well aware of rules on how you can burn, for example: https://www.cobbcounty.org/fire/fire-marshal/outdoor-burning.
This is a hard area to regulate. Any attempt to minimize that is reductive and unlikely to be helpful. Is why I picked something i know is allowed, burning in your yard, but with a condition I know is basically never allowed, against my fence.
They are a factor, in that you have to do it in a way that addresses pollution concerns. At large, that is probably going to include what accelerants and controls are allowed, as they will have a unique impact on the pollution generated.
Or are you suggesting that the pollution can, in fact, not be controlled and impacted in ways that may need special mitigations?
Under current regulations, people are often prevented from controlled burns due to air quality concerns under CEQA. This leads to fuel buildup.
When the eventual real wildfire happens, the risk to property and lives is much worse, and so is the pollution; places experiencing wildfire experience AQIs of 300,400+ when the WHO considers 150+ to be unhealthy. Mother Nature doesn’t have much concern for laws and regulations, and we have trouble controlling these large fires.
There is no way to control and thin fuel that does not result in pollution. Manual excavation is impractical and arguably worse since we’d be certainly trampling ecosystems in the process; these ecosystems are often expecting some baseline level of fire.
The entire discussion thread is about California, the CEQA in my parent comment is the California Environmental Quality Act, and here is an article describing the differences between the South and the West on burning policy: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1029821831/to-stop-extreme-wi...
> Florida has done prescribed burns on more than 1.6 million acres so far this year. California has only burned around 35,000 acres. The state is 2.5 times larger than Florida.
> About half of California is privately owned, and landowners have had little support from public agencies to conduct burns on their property. Permits from firefighting agencies and air quality regulators can be cumbersome to secure.
> In May [2021], Quinn-Davidson helped lead the first burn manager certification course in California. Fourteen local groups, known as prescribed burn associations, recently formed to help private landowners with burns across the state.
More, none of this actually shows that it is "air quality regulators" that is specifically preventing prescribed burns. That actually reads more as a dog whistle to get people riled up over the idea.
And indeed, the linked article presents a better explanation. Liability concerns on decontainment and other impacts goes a long way to stopping people from doing anything. Straight forwardly, if they do a controlled burn and it impacts others, they are liable to make the others whole. If a wildfire happens, they are both victims.
That is, this article is a direct downstream event from the "prescribed burn associates" effort of the NPR story. If you have a certified associate, you can get insurance to limit your liability. And this is largely because the certified associate will be following necessary rules and regulations to limit the impact. Any reason to think the associates will not be looking to pollution and safety concerns.
If you are strawmanning that I'm somehow saying you can't cause any pollution, I can only say that is not what I said. I said pollution should be a factor, but that is not the same as "you cannot cause pollution." And to insist that that is all it can be is again reductive and not helpful.
The world burning down in a roaring conflagration, or have you missed the entire chain of this conversation?
The pollution is going to happen. You get to chose what the scope of it is with controlled burns. Or you can give up that choice and enjoy the smoke of burning homes and cars.
There are some places where it will be unlikely that we can do controlled burns, pollution only being one of the factors. We should try to burn as much around those areas to reduce the likelihood a fire spreads to that area. But note, those controlled burns will create their own pollution.
We (humans) moved in to fire country, now we need to learn how to live with those poor choices.
More, it has not been established that it is too far into the "no pollution side at all." Do you have evidence that it is pollution regulation that has caused no controlled burns? Noting that I can bring up plenty of easy evidence of folks literally doing small scale controlled burns.
I don't think you all are doing it on purpose, but this is a dog whistle tactic to pull in a lot of anti regulation folks to yell about things.