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We Know How to Prevent Megafires

propublica.org

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Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#91

Post by gamblor956 »

emn13 wrote: post #13

Heads up that propublica doesn't mind intentionally deceiving readers; I don't trust them anymore. Just a few months ago I read this: https://www.propublica.org/article/taxpayers-paid-millions-t... - and my initial reaction was "bad, big company!" A little digging later; turns out the piece is deceptive to the point that I don't buy it's an accident. So hey; maybe they're telling the truth this time. But liar, liar,…

There is nothing wrong with the propublica article.

It simply claims that the company received public money years ago to design a low-cost ventilator that it never sold, and instead used that money to also design higher-cost ventilators that it actually started selling...without any inventory issues.

The company claims that the US tried to order the cheapo ventilators for COVID use too late, and they may be true, but that wasn't the point of the article.

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#92

Post by jeffbee »

r00fus wrote: post #68
jeffbee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need to sell federal holdings for timber production? BLM and NFS lands are heavily logged. They used to be much more heavily logged, but the decline is market-based, not policy. The national forests aren't some kind of tree museum. They exist for providing wood to the nation.

I disagree with the premise that BLM held land is for “providing wood to the nation” especially if we’re clear cutting those forests for profits today and ignore sustainability.

You can disagree with it, but sustainable wood harvesting is a top-level policy of the BLM, throughout its history and most recently in the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act. Both BLM and USFS are charged with "maintenance in perpetuity of a high-level annual or regular periodic output of the various renewable resources of the public lands consistent with multiple use."

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#93

Post by mc32 »

murgindrag wrote: post #88
brudgers wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CalFire updates its page regularly. And anyway Mountain View, San Francisco and Stanford weren’t at risk. Fires burn upward because heat rises. Silicon Valley is in a valley and built out. It’s not wilderness. There’s five minute fire response times throughout.

Five minute fire response times presume that there isn't a million acre fire saturating all fire departments. If CZU were rapidly spreading and hit the side of Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose all at once, I think we'd have multiday response times. Fortunately, it wasn't. Was it possible for it to spread like that? I don't know. During COVID19, we had a constant series of claims, repeated by politicians and pub…

If the CZU fire had jumped jurisdictions (HWY 35?) it would have turned worse because the Evergreen fire had sucked all those resources already.

The governator really needs to return firefighting resources back to normal. There has been a significant drawdown of resources in Cal as other states boost their capabilities but the governator has not countered that and now resources are thin in CA.

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#94

Post by gvd »

jefftk wrote: post #29

It's amazing how many obstacles we put in the way of planned burns, to prevent problems that we've been just have to accept when they happen unexpectedly on their own: Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules ar…

What pisses me off is that there are tons of people turning on their bloody fireplaces once the temperature drops below 60F. Then they complain about crap like this

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#95

Post by bsder »

jefftk wrote: post #29

It's amazing how many obstacles we put in the way of planned burns, to prevent problems that we've been just have to accept when they happen unexpectedly on their own: Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules ar…

> It's amazing how many obstacles we put in the way of planned burns, to prevent problems that we've been just have to accept when they happen unexpectedly on their own:

Except there is one really big obstacle that you fail to mention:

Money.

You can clear brush without controlled burns. You can engineer firebreaks. etc.

The problem is that you have to maintain these continuously--and that is expensive.

The reason why people only talk about "controlled burns" to clear brush is because that is cheap--not because it necessarily what is most effective.

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#96

Post by akiselev »

bamboozled wrote: post #86
zdragnar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there has been a general decrease in the value placed on self discipline. Part of it is the abundance of pretty much everything, and an overall rise in the basic standard of living for the average American. Part of it is the coincidental rise in the exaltation of self- social media reputation, self promotion, self fulfillment. This change, I think, is especially evident in the change over the past decades in…

This is called “anecdata”

Discussions are full of anecdata. That's what makes them interesting.

Care to contribute some of your own that add to or argue against the GP's?

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#97

Post by pegas1 »

Controled burns are only a part of the solution, generally substituting for large grazing animals that would keep the forest density and undergrowth at bay. Also, a lot of wetland in Califormia was dried and even rivers were straightened and deprived of the traditional meandering and inundation area. All that makes California dryer, slowly but surely decreasing water stored in the soil and therefore also decreasing secondary rainfall (summer thunderstorms from local evapotransiration) that would keep forests less dry.

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#98

Post by bamboozled »

akiselev wrote: post #96
bamboozled wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called “anecdata”

Discussions are full of anecdata. That's what makes them interesting. Care to contribute some of your own that add to or argue against the GP's?

"I think there has been a general decrease in the value placed on self discipline."

This is 100% just an opinion. I could also say that there are a LOT of people who are training harder and dieting due to things they see on Instaram for example.

It's really just hard to quantify something like this and it's really just a subjective opinion.

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#99

Post by svrb »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #81
svrb wrote: post #39

Though it may not seem like it at first, the problem is ideological. Somewhere along the line CA's left/progressive ideology picked up a deeply ironic tenet that the world must remain absolutely unchanged by human habitation; that whatever the state of nature was on some arbitrary day in the past, we have a moral duty to keep it that way. The strongest example of overreach is that absolutely no species may go extinct…

We have a solid idea about about the pre-European history of fire in the US west, including some information about native american practices during parts of that history (they burned, at least in some areas and for some of the time). We have hard evidence of what the last 100 years of forest management policy has done. Nobody is proposing "nature can never (be) change(d)". The point is that that we tried to do someth…

I believe you misunderstood my comment (perhaps I worded it poorly): I intended that it be interpreted as a statement purely within the meta-discussion. I shared a concern about the arguments used to justify both sides of the debate, and did not intend to advance one side or the other.

While you seem to believe I was arguing against preventative burns, the sibling comment seems to believe I was arguing for preventative burns which are (according to that comment) a crazy libertarian idea. This makes me wonder whether any critique of dogma must be reinterpreted as a disagreement about facts as a kind of memetic camouflage self-defense mechanism...

Re: We Know How to Prevent Megafires

#100

Post by egypturnash »

ip26 wrote: post #34
opportune wrote: post #21

In addition to controlled burns, I think it’s also worth mentioning that many of the inhabited forested areas of California should probably not be under human habitation due to the systemic fire risk (which is like building a house in a flood plain). Maybe it’s possible to make those communities safer by thinning out the forests, I don’t know. I do know that it sucks to have many fires be an emergency (requiring lots…

The situation would probably be a lot better if the human habitation in those areas was built with resisting forest fire as a primary design criteria. If they were built with fire as a fact of life, fire could be allowed to regularly sweep through & clear the fuel load.

Seriously, it’s not like CA doesn’t already have codes that make stuff quake-ready. I live in a flood plain and huge amounts of stuff is built up off the ground enough for a few feet of water to not be a problem, though sadly this is not actually enshrined in codes AFAIK.
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