Wildfires are erasing California's climate gains, research shows (2022)
17 comments
·January 19, 2025tbrownaw
This only really makes sense to say, if the wildfire are a result of climate policy. Which this article doesn't seem to be claiming.
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?
CyLith
I think that is only a partly correct way to think about it. I live up in the Sierra foothills in a very rural area, and based on what I see, I think the effects of wildfires are indeed negating climate policy. Allow me to explain.
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.
fiddlerwoaroof
As far as CO2 is concerned, wouldn’t burning “yard waste” be neutral year over year? If you’re only burning this year’s growth, you can’t release any more carbon than the plants took in to grow in the first place. The wildfires might not be neutral because our forests are overgrown, but if they happened more frequently and only burned a years worth of undergrowth, they would be
CyLith
As far as CO2 alone is concerned, that is true. The issue is that if you burn a fire cleanly, you (ideally) produce only CO2. If you burn the fire poorly, you produce less CO2 per se, and a _lot_ more particulates, which is bad for air quality. On burn days, the sky is noticeably smoggier all throughout the mountains, and the sunsets are tinted red. I imagine this would have the effect of trapping in daytime heat similarly to how cloudy nights after sunny days are warmer. And since pile burning generally happens during the day, we get an amplified greenhouse effect up here.
DidYaWipe
Why?
timewizard
> would have otherwise ended up buried/fossilized
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.
zbrozek
Heads up that this is from October 2022 and is not considering the recent urban fires.
jeezfrk
This is silly.
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.
whatever1
They need to burn their coal to get out of their poverty, like we did.
richardw
1 technology has moved on significantly. There are new options, and increased focus will deliver more.
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.
kylehotchkiss
If it wasn’t the wildfires, it was the termite fumigation gasses! https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03042024/california-sulfu...
ChrisArchitect
(2022)
null
xyst
unfortunately, California alone cannot carry the entire US in reversing climate change. We need federal action to get this country out of the stone age.
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_
mudil
From the WSJ:
"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."
Wildfire carbon emissions are very different from fossil fuel carbon emissions. Wildfires are releasing carbon that trees and other vegetation pulled out of the atmosphere in the relatively recent past. It's carbon-neutral for the same reason that burning firewood to heat your home is carbon-neutral.
Fossil fuel carbon emissions are releasing carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years. It's a net increase in current atmospheric carbon.