=land management =forests
Climate patterns have shifted due
to global warming. Higher ocean temperatures increase water evaporation, but
higher coastal temperatures reduce precipitation, causing rain to shift
further inland.
The forest fires recently seen in California, Oregon,
and southwest Canada could well happen every year. They could well get even
worse. When a forest burns, more-flammable species tend to be more
evolutionarily adapted to regrowth after a fire, and what grows tends to be
more flammable.
The solution is as simple as it is politically
impossible:
Remove flammable stuff and plant less-flammable
stuff.
Options for less-flammable trees to plant in that
region include
ponderosa pine, monterey cypress, and coast live oak.
I can already hear people saying:
"actually,
preventing forest fires is bad and makes fires worse"
"actually, logging
and thinning just makes things worse"
The overall amount of fires and
smoke has been greatly reduced for a century compared to both now and a
millenium ago, so saying that efforts at forest and fire management are
futile in the long-term is empirically false. The real objection is to any
human intervention.
That ideology exists to the extent that in some
cases, scientific studies and government officials can't be trusted. People
who want to believe something will sometimes cite a single flawed or
misunderstood study, other studies will cite that one study for the desired
(but wrong) result and confidently proclaim it as an assumption, media will
report that because "there are studies" so it must be correct, people will
tell their coworkers that because they heard it from other coworkers, and
thus something with no basis can become "scientifically backed" common
knowledge of some group. (That's basically what happened with, for example,
the
CDC insisting that COVID-19 was "NOT airborne" and some people saying
"building more highways actually increases traffic congestion".)
Yes, if trees are removed, and then small trees and bushes grow back, then
what grows back can be more flammable. But trees that are removed can't
burn. If more-flammable stuff grows back after clearing, the solution is to
plant less-flammable stuff. Note that the objections to removing trees
aren't even consistent: logging is supposedly unhelpful because small trees
are more flammable, but if you propose thinning a forest, removing small and
more-flammable trees, then that's supposedly unhelpful too. Selectively
removing old trees? Young trees? Certain species? No matter what you
propose, some people will say it's actually counterproductive and the
opposite is better, and then if you later propose the opposite, many of the
same people will object to that too.
Yes, more frequent fires can
reduce the size of forest fires, but they increase the total
amount of fire. Biomass growth per year increases when trees are
cleared, and trees that fall and rot instead of burning don't make smoke. Burning wood makes smoke, and the amount
of smoke is not
affected by whether a fire was started intentionally. Deliberate fires can
be a method of protecting specific populated areas, but are not effective as
a method of reducing overall smoke generation. Smoke from burning structures
can be worse than smoke from burning trees, but anyone citing a paper
finding that to argue that unintentional fires make worse smoke than
intentional ones is being disingenuous.
We know how much logging
costs. We know how much it costs other forestry departments to clear brush.
With some adjustments for rough terrain, clearing and replanting the entire
flammable area of California might be around $10 billion, burying the
cleared material and not including any income from lumber.
It's not
necessary to do that much. Cutting wide firebreaks to divide every flammable
area and replanting less-flammable trees in those would mostly eliminate
forest fires. The process of replacing flammable species with less-flammable
species and creating smaller divisions could continue gradually after that.
And at least some of the material could be sold, which offsets costs.
When the US Forest Service wants to remove some trees in California,
lawsuits (eg 1
2
3 4
5) stop them. Eucalyptus trees are non-native and very flammable, but
some people who grew up with them and
don't want them removed.
Basically, California will not do what's
needed to prevent forest fires without outside pressure. Luckily, we already
have precedent for outside pressure: the 2019
threatened
sanctions against Brazil. (By the way, at the time, there were many more
fires in the Amazon than usual as counted by satellites, but they were
mostly small, and the total burned area was slightly below average.)
So, I have a simple proposal:
1) Brazil and
some European governments threaten sanctions against California for the
contribution of its forest fires towards global warming.
2) The US
federal government amends the Clean Air Act to cover smoke from forest
fires.
3) Other US states sue the government of California for a trillion
dollars over health and economic damages.