Many plants also need fires to repopulate. Its a huge issue.
Unless it’s eucalypts, then they’ll eventually get it don’t you worry.
Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
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Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#12The only federal regulation I saw referenced in the article were clean air regulations. Otherwise, it appears states and their residents are imposing additional barriers. And public opinion is a local issue of course as well. I don't know if it's really possible to change public ignorance, particularly if the strong opinions are political, so this might be a case where it makes sense for the federal government to step in. We can't just let CO decide to burn themselves to the ground without that decision putting other states at risk.
Controlled burns happen regularly in NC on state and federal land.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#13One of the big problems is that controlled burns can and do become uncontrolled burns. The largest ever wildfire in New Mexico was started as a planned burn (more honest label) just last year. [1]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/2...
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#14Goats emit less co2 than “controlled burns”, and mixed species mature forests don’t have the undergrowth problem commercial cutting cycles entail
With respect to the west coast of the united states this is an absurd proposal.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#15One of the big problems is that controlled burns can and do become uncontrolled burns. The largest ever wildfire in New Mexico was started as a planned burn (more honest label) just last year. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/2...
I'd rather experience frequent uncontrolled burns in areas that do regular controlled burns than even a single uncontrolled burn in an area that doesn't.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#16Make no mistake about just how much money is involved here.
I got to work on a helicopter used for fire. It was a 1980s French something or another. It took an RPG in Afganistan and was refurbed to live in the pacific northwest.
The crew makes an insane amount of money. They are tickled with how many fires there are a year and how they "have" to be put out. I'm talking areas so far away from houses that it takes an hour to get there by helo, dump a few buckets, then an hour back. MAYBE in a 9 hour shift you get 12 buckets dumped.
This vehicle has only one turbine engine and goes through about 300 gallons an hour. There were two blackhawks in the same area that burn twice that, two engines.
Think of the money to make it not only profitable, but exceptionally so, to run vehicles that burn 300 gallons an hour for 8-12 hours a day, per helo, per engine, with crew, and the millions it costs to upkeep, cert, logistics, insurance, etc.
This is business now. And that's just one annecdote about helos. When you see people and machinery it takes to run firecrews, it's a wonder there aren't even more firecrew arsonists than there already are.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#17This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system.
When the option for positive action to mitigate a problem exists, we often don't do it because the action creates legal liability for any and all negative externalities of the action, even if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing.
We resist permitting prescribed burns because when they cause unintended damage and harm, there's a person to institution to blame, so no one wants to take on that liability. So instead, we let brush grow out of control and eventually a mega fire hits that creates orders of magnitude more destruction and health hazard than the sum of all prescribed burns ever would have.
Another example is medical treatment. If you develop cancer and die because you get no treatment, there's no person to blame and no one to sue. It's just an "act of god" so people accept the outcome and move on. But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was drastically improved by their intervention.
The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing will be drastically worse.
I don't know how we solve this problem. To me, the root of the problem seems to be a weakness of the constitution of our society and/or leaders.
Collectively, we need to figure out how to balance diffuse statistical risk against acute, dramatic risk, or else we all risk being the frog slowly boiled alive.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#18This 'controlled burn' issue is a general principle in risk management as well, where you respond to minor issues so as to not let them pile up into a tinderbox inferno.
Risk aversion isn't prudent, ethical, or professional either. It's a source of false conflict whose purpose is to centralize the objector so that they can direct and manage a proposed change. This is from someone who has been working in security for longer than most. It's something I find repulsive about some of the people who have joined the field, where once it was hackers who used elevated competence to judiciously take risks, and now it's authoritarian personalities who use affected fear and appeals to uncertainty under the guise of safety to position themselves as gatekeepers.
The same is true for government policy on controlled burns. Nobody ever gets fired over mega wildfires, even though their gatekeeping is the direct cause of them.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#19[flagged]
Also see resistance to nuclear fission.
Environmentalists have inadvertently shot civilization in the foot and served the interests of the fossil fuel industry by blocking expansion of carbon free nuclear.
In exchange, we've spent the last several decades dumping drastically more carbon in the atmosphere than was necessary.
Re: Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
#20This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system. When the option for positive action to mitigate a problem exists, we often don't do it because the action creates legal liability for any and all negative externalities of the action, even if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing. We resist permitting prescribed burns because when they cause uninte…
And this just generalizes to the recurring problem of individualism vs collectivism. Government regulation is the answer, but it's not being applied efficiently here