Wildfires are erasing California's climate gains, research shows (2022)
news.uchicago.edu
news.uchicago.edu
There’s evidence that prescribed burns may lead to less carbon emissions [1].
In chaparral regions like the LA fires, prescribed burns might not help with carbon emissions. And for fire suppression I suspect there’s only so much that can be done to be responsive enough to recent hydrology changes.
Fossil fuel carbon emissions are releasing carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years. It's a net increase in current atmospheric carbon.
It's really bad for the environment.
On the other hand pollution standards can leave a lot to be desired and the EPA certification is being gamed [1].
I am interested in this topic- I would like to get the least polluting wood stove available (in the US).
[1] https://www.nescaum.org/documents/nescaum-review-of-epa-rwh-...
Wildfires in suburban communities are burning non-wood materials, including many things made from hydrocarbons.
Also I don't think the stuff that burns in these would have otherwise ended up buried/fossilized, so maybe it shouldn't actually count at all?
For people who have never lived in an area that is both rural and wildfire prone, pile burning to eliminate yard waste is an activity that is entirely foreign. You see, out here, most people believe that the primary method of eliminating yard waste is by burning it in a pile. I happen to live in town where there is trash pickup service available, but I opt to simply take stuff to the dump myself. Most people don't want to pay or don't have such service available. Burning yard waste is almost always extremely polluting. One burn pile full of leaves and pine needles can often smoke out my entire town. Fortunately, pile burning is only allowed on certain days (when the weather is such that wildfire risk is reduced). That is not to say that pile burning is always so bad; it has to be done properly. If the pile is hot enough, there is little smoke. But most people do not burn them hot enough with enough long-burning materials (i.e. wood).
So why did I bring this up, since a wildfire is just this on a massive scale? Well, I do not personally believe that properly managed fuel management would result in as much smoke and particulate pollution, for two reasons. One, indigenous peoples here used to regularly set fire to the forest to manage the fuel load. This was done regularly enough that there simply wasn't as much material to burn, and done when weather was cooperative (e.g. before rains). A modern wildfire can burn with such ferocity that most trees end up burning, instead of just the undergrowth. This represents a much greater release of long-captured CO2. And second, there is now a culture of placing responsibility on individual residents to maintain "defensible space", asking them to perform pile burning regularly. As I mentioned above, this results in what feels like disproportionately dense particulate pollution, with annoying regularity throughout the cooler times of year.
Trees don't live for all that long. Many common varieties only live for around 100 to 200 years.
> so maybe it shouldn't actually count at all?
The targets are just policy targets. That anything "counts" is just a paperwork game. However, as the article points out, if you want to make good administrative policy you should always consider the cost:benefit ratio. Perhaps California's policymakers have actually lost track of this give the sheer scale of recent fires.
There is a more subtle link too. The fact that you can blame fires on climate change, means that people can evade accountability for poor management of forests (and other risky land) which means they can skimp on spending on reducing risk - e.g. through controlled fires.
Ever since microorganisms evolved to eat dead plant matter the conditions to make coal on planet earth (and to create a carbon sink of buried coal) have been gone.
What you are saying implies this is not a sink.
Inhabited areas everywhere and non-inhabited areas everywhere have had an extreme growth in wildfire.
The gains stay the same be cause they were examples to other human-apes with other invisiible-line kingdoms.
Sum totals for the coal spewing nations and states among us are far worse.
2 if a few hundred million people burn coal while we move up the tech tree it’s not a huge deal. If 7 billion people do, it really is. That’s a big part of why China has embraced solar, hard. It’s a new reality and we need solutions that fit the context.
It would be very easy to do. Measure CO2 average over year 2022, then over year 2023, and save difference. Then measure average in 2024, and compare difference to a previous one. If it s higher then humans get an F or 1/5 mark. If it lower, then the mark will be a bit better, depending on our actual, real performance in climate change.
Shame this stupid country re-elected a very friendly administration of the O&G industry, gutted the regulatory agencies with reversal of Chevron deference, and a party which installed a SCOTUS that is _very_ friendly to O&G.
It fucking sucks and I hate it. We have failed and the decisions happening today (re-election of an idiot) will be felt for _decades_
"Start with its environmental obsessions. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in 2019 sought to widen a fire-access road and replace old wooden utility poles in the Topanga Canyon abutting the Palisades with steel ones to make power lines fire- and wind-resistant. In the process, crews removed an estimated 182 Braunton’s milkvetch plants, an endangered species.
The utility halted the project as state officials investigated the plant destruction. More than a year later, the California Coastal Commission issued a cease-and-desist order, fined the utility $2 million, and required “mitigation” for the project’s impact on the species.
Since the milkvetch requires wildfires to propagate, the only way to boost its numbers is to let the land burn. A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans from what they view as the plant’s rightful habitat."