Since burning releases CO2 into the atmosphere, are there alternatives to burning? Maybe it's difficult to do something with the vast amount of dry wood/plants, even if one manages to collect them?
Burning wood and plant matter in a non destructive way is carbon neutral as that carbon will grow back as trees. It’s part of a natural cycle, like a carbon bank.
The problem is that we’ve been pulling up buried and fossilised trees and burning them, which introduces excessive amounts of CO2 and ruins the natural balance of the carbon bank.
Yes, burning wood is carbon neutral in the long run but clearly emits carbon now (and the earth gets hotter now).
It would be nice to think about maybe collecting undergrowth and turning it to charcoal in something like a kiln and then burying it - reverse coal mining. Of course, we'd want to stop regular coal mining first.
Plants leave roots in the ground and carbon in soil. No till farming practices of grains and corns sequester massive amounts of carbon into the soil. We dont need to do anything special just quit doing things wrong.
I think you underestimate the amount of carbon we dug out of the soil if you believe that no-till farming will sequester even a fraction of that back in reasonable time frames.
The non-burning natural decomposition of wood also releases the carbon into the atmosphere, as CO2, methane, etc. It's a neutral cycle, as plants are recently grown from atmospherically-sourced carbon.
Deforestation and pulling old oil & coal out of the ground and into the atmosphere is what tips the balance.
This is a totally valid question that is getting down votes it shouldn't. And the answer is yes, there are alternatives to burning.
Burning will return what the tree pulled out of the atmosphere, so it's already carbon neutral.
Decomposition and fertilization (eg hugelkulture) will also release greenhouse gases. So, again, carbon neutral.
Pyrolysis allows you to produce synthetic gas, biochar, and energy from the wood. Biochar is a useful industrial and agricultural product, and it's pretty much just solid carbon. Hypothetically you could bury it and be carbon negative, but there isn't really anyone doing that at scale.
You could also bury the wood deeply enough that it wouldn't re enter the carbon cycle, but wood is heavy, large, and difficult to move around.
I hope your down voters realize the intent of your question (can we sequester the carbon from forest waste/slash rather than releasing it?) and adjust their votes.
Thank you for seeing the question for what it is. Genuinely was wondering if there are good alternatives to controlled burns. If not then of course controlled burns are significantly better than wild fires.
One thought that crossed my mind was if a burn after collecting the debris can be used for energy generation with proper emissions filtering/control etc. That would also offset other energy related emissions. But as someone below writes perhaps the collection and transportation of the debris would take more energy than what this would generate.
Coal and oil are adding carbon to the atmosphere that was not there within human timeframes. Yes, perhaps on a geologic scale it is neutral, but we generally think about carbon on a human scale.
The US and state governments have long done controlled burns as well; this isn't some lost native american art. It's just that in more recent years, homeowners and tourism boards and the like really, really didn't want any fires at all, no matter the consequence.
> We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.
> Megafires, like the ones that have ripped this week through 1 million acres (so far), will continue to erupt until we’ve flared off our stockpiled fuels. No way around that.
Yes, controlled burns are useful at any stage. It's not like current climate is the hottest ever for this planet. In fact, it's one of the more cold ones: glaciation still exists!
by the point we leave the ice age, there's no guarantee that there'll be anything left to burn - the whole place could undergo desertification well before the ice caps melt.
It is extremely unlikely. Go to google maps, somewhere near perm and zoom to a level where you can see individual buildings. Then try scrolling east to Vladivostok, and notice how long it will take and how many trees are there.
Worst case predictions for complete loss of the ice sheets is 500 years [1] while the desertification of Mesopotamia only took a few hundred years of pre-Common era agriculture. Russia's forests are vast but we're on an industrial speed run and I've seen how fast the populations can collapse here in California thanks to some beetles and a single extended drought. Every time I visit my hometown I see the same thing happening in Russia in an ecosystem and society that are, like California and its chaparrals, completely unprepared for increasingly hostile weather.
The example I had in mind was the Sahara, or even just the evidence that the U.S. modwest has gone through significant periods of time as a desert. In ye olden days there might have been rainforest at the poles, but near the equator things were less lush.
Controlled burns are harder to do as climate change gets worse, but that just means creating larger firebreaks around burn zones and dedicating more resources in a shorter timespan (due to the shrinking season for safe burns).
Many insurance companies in fire prone areas already require homeowners to clear their yards of fuel so with well funded, proactive fire departments, the vast majority of populated areas can be protected with a once a decade (or less frequent) burns.
the statement isn't that Mediterranean climates burn. The statement is that a Mediterranean climate, California's climate, is a climate that is designed to burn. If you are going to be pedantic, do it right.
Lets do it right, then. Climates are not designed to burn. Is impossible in fact. Temperatures can't burn itselves. Are an abstract concept. Frost can't burn, neither can humidity, hours of sun or rain. So lets start by the most basic thing that is not mistaking an animal with a cloud, please.
I'll repeat again here. Some Mediterranean biocenoses are shaped by fire. Not all. Other NOT.
And shaped by fire means that they can stand fire, they can even promote it, and are frozen in its current state by fire. This does not mean that this is the better, or only possible outcome for that place. Ecosystems are always trying to reach the most higher level of organization possible. And those are very humid, even in Mediterranean climates.
Still not pedantic enough. Ecosystems aren't designed and they aren't trying to reach levels of organization - they just are. There's no concept of "better." The current equilibrium for the climate in these regions of the west involves frequent fires. Stopping fires has disrupted the ecosystem by moving it away from the equilibrium state, resulting in situations conducive to much larger and more destructive fires (destructive to humans - to the ecosystem defining "destructive" is difficult, and the fires likely move the system back to equilibrium).
I'm not sure what your argument is trying to accomplish- its pretty clesr to anyone reading that the discussion is about how the ecosystem has evolved such that forest fires are an important and integral part of maintaining equilibrium, and pushing the system into disequilibrium is a root cause of the current fire disaster. I could at least respect a pedantic technically correct argument, but technically, ecosystems arent trying to reach any level of organization and the concept of "better" does not apply to ecosystems- theres no moral or other ranking to biomes!
I think your ecology textbooks are a few decades out of date. Monoclimax theory is obsolete[0]. Its much more accurate to consider the equilibrium state than to imagine an ecosystem as working towards some idealized climax. And "better" is a very subjective human-centric term - its utterly meaningless without context (e.g. this ecosystem is better for supporting higher levels of biodiversity). Try asking a beachgoer and a skier whether summer or winter is "better" and see how far that scientific discussion gets you.
It's surprising there isn't some sort of legal requirement to carry out strategic controlled burns.
If urban sprawl is the root cause of not conducting these, there should be more regulation and accountability on a small govt scale. They are the ones who approve/decline developer plans. Sounds like there may be a tragedy of the commons game theory issue here where certain counties are cashing in on local development projects while offloading the risk to outside counties.
The same US and state governments that used to regularly practice controlled burns in the Pacific Northwest, later banned those controlled burns, to devastating consequences. It's only been the last few years that we've seen a reversal of that, but it's been too little, too late.
I'm also in Sonoma County and the combination of urban building spread on known fire plains coupled with a lack of vegetation management is having devastating consequences. I've been listening to the Sonoma County budget deliberations of the cliquey board of supervisors here all week, there is greater emphasis on spending on itinerant and homeless populations than on forestry management which makes little sense.
I agree that Sonoma county is mighty cliquey and likes to beat around the bikeshed... but, I also don't think they're the ones who would do controlled burns. I'm also glad that we have (some) state officials that know what they're doing on controlled burns since they're hard to do without endangering people, property, and prosperity. Certainly, it's a lot better than having a bunch of SWE figure it out by reading news articles or wikipedia. Maybe that's what happened in Big Sur?
I don't claim to be an expert, but I've talked to oldfarts^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d people (partnered with First Peoples) who have designed controlled burns, forest management experts with degrees in the topic, and even folks who run timber companies... and it's known there's a lot that could be done, but... the Santa Cruz and West Sonoma redwood fires are unprecedented. It takes a lot to get those coastal forests ablaze... enough that you're not going to get a controlled burn in Cazadero, Bonny Doon, or Empire Grade. They (unlike the interior) don't typically burn more than every 50-100 years. You can log reasonably large areas and remove underbrush, but in a wildfire like these last few weeks the flames can jump miles and that's too much area to safely log (mud slides) or regularly burn. Big Creek lost a lot of good timber in well managed forest that didn't stop the fires.
I'm also confused by the idea that if the same areas of Napa and Lake county could just burn a few more times then they wouldn't burn the next few years. It hasn't worked the last 3 times (really check caltopo for the burn overlap). It's just low brush that grows back quickly, because all of the trees that were on it have been burnt off. Then you get to Sierras where the pine beetle has created huge areas of kindling... but where was that beetle 300 years ago? Not in the Americas. How invested were the Miwok in stationary real estate? Not so much, it was a different time and a different attitude.
This all just has the ring of climate change denial...
Walking around redwood groves of 1000 year old trees with burn scars, the reality is that California ecology has always had 'cleansing' fires. The humans, the abysmal electric grid that starts a lot of the fires and building in fire plains have predictable results in amplifying that at this time of year.
Paradise (which used to be called 'pair of dice') is one of the most dangerous places to live in California, a combination of winds, canyons and narrow roads. They've had endless fires in that part of the world, but more people moved there (cheap) and when the 1912 pge power pylon fell over on a 45% wooded hill the inevitable happened.
Most of Houston Texas is built on a flood plain, yet people will be astounded and appalled when they have a 100 year flood and the UK Guardian etc will blame it on global warming...
Converting wooded areas to homes means that the required controlled burn ares aren't there anymore either, they are trying to protect land that didn't used to be protected because now it's houses.
Pretty obvious in retrospect, confusing that we're still doing it, unclear how we'd reverse it, probably no good way out...
A dark but predictable outcome is that they will eventually burn down, and insurance companies will be afraid of covering new development in these areas. After which point controlled burns can again occur
Yeah, this works... once. Maybe twice. At some point no one will insure you and you are seriously on your own because the fire department just won't come. But I suppose it is technologically feasible to design a less likely to burn home. You'd have to actually try though.
Australian firefighers have said that every time they do controlled burns they receive mountains of complaints about smoke or about how hot debris burned holes in their garden shade. Also how the weather now leaves less and less time where burns can be safely done.
The wood chipper really only shuffles the problem around, and doesn't provide the ecological boon that many West Coast species are dependent upon.
After all, that debris has to get moved somewhere, or it is just more fuel. Further, what are you running the wood chipper with? Where are you getting it from? How are the people doing the work getting there?
Planned/properly engineered burns just work, and the only reason they stopped was an accumulation of humanity that refused to adapt to the ecological needs of their environment to an excessive degree.
I'll concede we're now in the territory of arguing what constitutes "excessive" degree, which to me is any cessation of activity that tends to increase ecological stability over time, rendering an area unfit or overly risky for human population or sustainable economic/ecological value extraction. I'm generally open to a lot of pro-environmental policies as long as knock-on effects are generally counted into the equation, but your wood chipper idea falls foul of A) seeming to glance over them with little scrutiny, B) not taking into account the ecology of the area.
It really does sound like a fundamentally people driven problem.
And the aborigines in Australia - I don’t know what The US education about native Americans is like, but the Aussie one apparently still talked about controlled burns as being backwards nonsense by brown people into the 90s.
I’m not sure that the US education system gets even that far as I know many state education systems say that many slaves enjoyed being slaves...
Make no mistake. These problems are solvable. There is an active political will (via the majority of people). Yet, the three States that are burning millions of acres are apathetic right now. This could be solved for many years going forward. Raise taxes (the richer, the higher the fee) then fix the problem and also force the Federal Government to do a better job with their land. This isn't just a State/local govt problem a large portion of the West Coast is owned by the Federal Government.
Trump is brazen, you now have political coverage to be just as brazen to fix these issues. We should be expecting more from our leaders because what we have now is a poor rationalization for shitty leadership. 16 of the past 20 years have been record breaking fires in California, this isn't a new problem. It's just long overdue to be solved.
P.S. I have zero faith that this will be fixed. It's fairly clear to me that the entire political servants aren't actually leading, they're apathetic while the country literally burns. It's not a difficult thing to ask that our elected leaders stop this in the short-term, let alone the long-term. It's difficult when we rationalize their bullshit, so expect more.
> Raise taxes (the richer, the higher the fee) then fix the problem
Is there any indication that this is caused by shortage of funds? Policy is what is preventing proper forest management. Compared to building highways and state-funded healthcare, forest raking and related tasks are cheap.
> Is there any indication that this is caused by shortage of funds?
States don't have the luxury to just print money. For example, California uses inmates to supplement their firefighting workforce and at least 9 States have come to our aid this season, due to covid19 reducing that slave/prison labor.
I wouldn't call it 'policy' that prevents OR and WA. Most likely true in CA. I'd call it lack of desire. Most politicians aim for the most popular ideas that help get them reelected, not something prudent.
I don't care if I get down voted. Even if the West Coast wasn't in drier conditions, this would still be a problem. Not only that, I'm skeptical that WA is that dry. Maybe in select places but I'm very skeptical, maybe the heat changed the situation as well (record highs all throughout the West Coast prior to these fires).
Look, if you aren't blaming your leaders while things are this bad. How can you praise them when things are good? This is your life. This is your health. This is you and your families future. The blame falls on them, full stop.
The fact that the Governor didn't threaten the Bay/Tech Sector with steep taxes if they don't help fix it, is another stupid move. This isn't rocket science. This isn't something too far for humanity to solve. If you care about your State, be patriot and save it from the fires.
We're in crisis after crisis, yet no one is actually leading. Good luck having a State with 2 more decades of this. If you didn't murder them through gross negligence then you destroyed their lungs/health with all this smoke.
Gov Newsom signed a thing to allow prisoners to accept a low paying job as a firefighter? Seriously? Why not argue with your legislature and work on behalf of the people? That's right, no one gives a damn and if you think to the contrary, what actions have they done that make you think that?
Did you know a lot of residential new construction, in CA, is in fire prone areas? This is because...? Good leaders? Or are the people going to demand more from their leaders?
> Look, if you aren't blaming your leaders while things are this bad. How can you praise them when things are good? This is your life. This is your health. This is you and your families future. The blame falls on them, full stop.
That's not true. The blame falls on the voters who keep voting for those clowns, one after another in a parade of lies, greed, and obfuscation, all for the promised, immediate benefits.
> Gov Newsom signed a thing to allow prisoners to accept a low paying job as a firefighter?
If I was in prison, I'd take such a job voluntarily. I'd much prefer working outdoors on something useful than rotting away in a concrete box.
> is in fire prone areas?
My understanding is that the risk of your house burning down can be greatly reduced with some fairly inexpensive design and materials changes. This can be done via the building code.
1491 covers "Indian fire" quite a bit. Seems that much of North America was under some form of active management by native peoples before Europeans arrived, and one of the main ways, and probably the main way, by area, was very frequent fire-setting. The book even suggests that might be why there is a "Great Plains", in the nearly-treeless form European settlers found it, while in the East early European accounts tell of huge forest "wildernesses" so universally free of undergrowth one could easily ride a horse through them, which would become impassably full of low growth by a couple hundred years later as the burning stopped.
Fire is used for agriculture by modern people. Burning your farm at the end of the season was banned in Oregon in 2014 (with some exceptions), but is still practiced most places in the world.
I live next to a greenbelt. It is pretty much impossible to push your way through the undergrowth. I'm aware that if it ever catches on fire my house is toast.
I remember a couple of decades ago people were talking about how they weren't allowed to clear or perform controlled burns on the dead underbrush. People can think they are doing good but are actually being shortsighted, causing more problems than they fix.
Not who you are responding to, but can they put restrictions on land under the federal BLM? My understanding is that the feds manage about 58% of California’s forestland, including much of what is on fire right now.
It’s a mess; the state and local government should do more, but also the feds, people should stop building up so much in the woods, etc. lots of blame in a complicated situation with no easy answers.
Preventative techniques are being ignored by our governments, who are instead focused on political messaging around climate change. Climate change may indeed be worsening dry fuel loads, but there’s a lot in terms of forest management that simply isn’t being addressed and could go a long way in preventing wildfires.
As this article notes, controlled burns are an important tool, and based on personal observation they seem vastly underused today compared to the frequency with which we used to see them in the past. We also need responsible forest management to thin trees and clear brush. We also need proper management (or funding) of power utilities, which have been responsible for many wildfires on the West coast - and I don’t mean just PG&E in CA (see https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-sparked-at-least-1-500-cal...), as some recent fires in WA were also sparked by power lines downed by trees that were too close and poorly managed. We also need relaxed regulations for private land owners - I know home owners in WA who were prevented from removing dangerous trees on their land and the difficult, expensive, time consuming process of getting permits caused them to give up and ignore the trees ultimately until they naturally fell. Unfortunately I had a tree fall on my house that my neighbor ignored for the same reasons.
It feels to me like basic common sense techniques to prevent wildfires have been abandoned, and rules intended to protect the environment have backfired in some cases.
Forestry management works: WaPo has noted that Finland does a lot better than its neighbors when it comes to wildfires due to controlled burns and compartmentalization of forests (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/11/19/why-finland-...). That compartmentalizations comes in part from a dense forest road network that makes the forests accessible and has also subdivided them (https://www.is.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005903733.html). Another interesting note is that Trump was widely ridiculed for his “raking” comment, but he was somewhat correct, although he misunderstood the term. Visit a clear cut of a timber stand in WA or OR and you’ll see a tangled mess left on the ground (brush, branches, stumps) that’ll dry up into a mass of fuel waiting for a spark. In Finland, they invest in clearing the land of what would otherwise be prime forest fire fuel in a process known as a “root rake” (see example video of machinery at https://youtu.be/o_EZeAiy3ew).
Voters need to draw more attention to preventative techniques and ask that funds be redirected accordingly. In Washington state, our Department of Natural Resources has been asking for increased investment in managing the fuel load and thinning forests for years (see https://www.dnr.wa.gov/StrategicFireProtection). The private forestry industry also has been asking for increased investment/assistance from the state in thinning and prescribed burns (http://www.wfpa.org/sustainable-forestry/reduce-wildfire-ris...). However these calls have been ignored, despite ever increasing state budgets, and our governor and legislature have done little to address the issue. Please contact your representatives and don’t let them get ...
Finland is not a great comparison point though, since it's generally too wet. Forest fires do happen during dry spells in the summer, but not on a Californian/Australian scale, because a dry spell is measured in weeks, not years.
If you look at the links I provided, you’ll see they have much better wildfire results than their immediate neighbors (who deal with the same climate) and also that their own results have improved over time significantly despite forest size increasing (more fuel load). I think their approaches warrant a deep examination and we should learn from their successes, even if their scale is different. For example, why wouldn’t compartmentalization via a dense road network and forest management work in the US? Sure the worst wind driven wildfires may still take place but there are many more that would be prevented. I don’t think the scale impacts how well their approaches would translate.
I don't get why we talk about forest management as if it's the main culprit for what's going on right now.
Don't y'all remember between 2012 and 2017 the west coast went through a MASSIVE DROUGHT? Are Californians really this forgetful?
The constant dry heat waves killing off large swaths of our forests is the thing that is now providing the tinder for our massive fires. Other states like Washington, Oregon, and Idaho are experiencing the same thing. It's not just California.
I've been here a long time and I don't ever remember experiencing smoke smothering our cities for weeks on end until these past few years.
Calling out forest management like it's some sort of magic bullet is kind of like telling individuals to stop using straws to clean up ocean waste.
Sure, it might help a little but it doesn't really solve the root cause systemic issue: Climate Change.
The droughts happen in multi year intervals, and the reservoir system hasnt been expanded since the 60s. The primary issue is fuel buildup and invasive species. Global warming is just icing on the cake.
We’re already zooming past the 1° limits. 2°C feels like the best outcome. 3-4°C seems realistic given that 52 US Senators are adamantly opposed to any climate action.
This isn’t meant to dissuade anyone from voting on Nov 3. On the contrary, I firmly believe that the future of our civilization rests on the outcome.
We need a clear headed, science-heeding majority of legislators in congress come January, plus a president willing to sign their legislation into law.
We are out of time. Shit cake or chocolate, this is it.
Personally I don't think the outcome of the election on November is going to matter one way or the other, because I don't trust politics to consistently deliver clear headed, science based policy.
It's not just this election we need concern our selves with, but all those after it too.
One party denies climate change, the other acknowledges it at least.
One result opens the door, the other closes it.
The election will absolutely decide our fate.
But I agree with you regarding continuing to push after the election. If by some chance we can get the door open, it'll take continued social pressure & outreach to truly make progress.
It is estimated that 3 mil acres burned in 2020 so far.
But before the Golden Rush that number is estimated to be 4.5 mil of acres per year. We need better forest management which means more controlled burns.
Climate change is not the root cause here, it is an amplifier. Which means we need to plan for the effects of climate change too.
And the only hope to slow climate change is a global effort, or at the very least on a country level. California closes nuclear power plants earlier than expected and then LA county buys 18% of its electricity from Utah generated on coal plants.
I don't get it. While I wasn't alive in the period immediately following the gold rush, I've been here over 40 years and I don't ever remember fires blanketing our entire state in smoke for extended periods of time until recently.
Did we just get lucky somehow between the Gold Rush and 2018?
I agree w/ you on global effort for climate change. Hopefully we can get started on a National level soon.
Yes. There have been periods of decades where the East Coast was basically uninhabitable. There is a reason why civilization was just barely in the megalithic in America when Columbus arrived.
>> I've been here over 40 years and I don't ever remember fires blanketing our entire state in smoke for extended periods of time until recently.
This stuff was not uncommon over the hundreds of years of this country's history. As other commenters have mentioned, it's lasted for decades in the American East, West, and particularly Midwest.
Climate change is an issue, but saying this stuff never happens and (presumably human-led) climate change is the sole reason is not really likely to be true.
no we didn’t get lucky. We started fighting fires which used to occur naturally. That leads to accumulation of unhealthy forest growth which eventually burns in a big way (now).
And of course other effects like PG&E not maintaining their grid => unnecessary fires; more people live in forests => more deadly/damaging fires; etc.
As usual, looking at data and scientific consensus will help, I just hope we start doing so sooner, rather than later
Something to integrate into your thought; the unregulated water table that allows agriculture to tap deeper and deeper and deplete the aquifers to keep CA the '5th largest economy' in the world.
How much does that contribute to the general aridness of the area?
The part of northern California I grew up in has been experiencing weather that I never experienced in over 30 years growing up there & going back to visit.
It has been far hotter and more humid, so I'd say this isn't just down to overgrown forests.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the culprits for the fires are Eucalyptus trees imported from Australia. It seems a bit backwards that American Indians would know how Australian Aborigines dealt with forests.
While the imported eucalyptus is awful (easily catches fire, often explodes while on fire, grows like a weed), I don't think we can point to just one culprit here.
In the 80’s, there was a fight won by the left to stop logging especially of old growth. I think that they were right to prevent the wholesale cutting down of trees but they went too far. They also prevented culling of trees and controlled burns. They argued that culling would just be an excuse to continue logging. They also argued that controlled burns would incentivize logging. The prevention of culling and controlled burns caused underbrush to grow and grow. The side effect of massive fires was known even then and was ignored by the left.
Now we are suffering from that ideological purity stupidity. The forests were just a bomb waiting to go off and at least in the Bay Area were triggered by the massive number of lightning strikes.
Some additional points.
This isn’t due to urban encroachment. Just look at the number and extent of the forest fires. They are basically everywhere including areas with very few people.
Forest fires are a natural occurrence but our actions tilted it toward massive fires and massive numbers of simultaneous fires.
Must we again suffer from ideological purity stupidity? This isn’t directly caused by global warming.
Edit: people who downvote because this strikes too close to home are sad
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[ 1679 ms ] story [ 692 ms ] threadYou’re not comparing no-CO2 to some CO2 (and CO, and everything else, etc). You’re comparing some co2 to unbelievably large amounts of CO2 (etc)
The problem is that we’ve been pulling up buried and fossilised trees and burning them, which introduces excessive amounts of CO2 and ruins the natural balance of the carbon bank.
It would be nice to think about maybe collecting undergrowth and turning it to charcoal in something like a kiln and then burying it - reverse coal mining. Of course, we'd want to stop regular coal mining first.
Deforestation and pulling old oil & coal out of the ground and into the atmosphere is what tips the balance.
Burning will return what the tree pulled out of the atmosphere, so it's already carbon neutral.
Decomposition and fertilization (eg hugelkulture) will also release greenhouse gases. So, again, carbon neutral.
Pyrolysis allows you to produce synthetic gas, biochar, and energy from the wood. Biochar is a useful industrial and agricultural product, and it's pretty much just solid carbon. Hypothetically you could bury it and be carbon negative, but there isn't really anyone doing that at scale.
You could also bury the wood deeply enough that it wouldn't re enter the carbon cycle, but wood is heavy, large, and difficult to move around.
I hope your down voters realize the intent of your question (can we sequester the carbon from forest waste/slash rather than releasing it?) and adjust their votes.
One thought that crossed my mind was if a burn after collecting the debris can be used for energy generation with proper emissions filtering/control etc. That would also offset other energy related emissions. But as someone below writes perhaps the collection and transportation of the debris would take more energy than what this would generate.
Couldn't you make the same argument about burning literally anything?
Doesn't burning oil just return carbon to the atmosphere that was already in the atmosphere at one point anyway?
This is just an excuse to burn. There is not good CO2 molecules and bad CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. More CO2: bad. Less CO2: good
From the time I was a child to now, controlled burns have basically vanished. It correlated with people moving here.
Propublica recently confirmed this anecdote:
https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...
> We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.
> Megafires, like the ones that have ripped this week through 1 million acres (so far), will continue to erupt until we’ve flared off our stockpiled fuels. No way around that.
I'm from South Australia, so raging fatal bushfires were a part of my childhood.
Worst case predictions for complete loss of the ice sheets is 500 years [1] while the desertification of Mesopotamia only took a few hundred years of pre-Common era agriculture. Russia's forests are vast but we're on an industrial speed run and I've seen how fast the populations can collapse here in California thanks to some beetles and a single extended drought. Every time I visit my hometown I see the same thing happening in Russia in an ecosystem and society that are, like California and its chaparrals, completely unprepared for increasingly hostile weather.
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/will-antarctica...
Many insurance companies in fire prone areas already require homeowners to clear their yards of fuel so with well funded, proactive fire departments, the vast majority of populated areas can be protected with a once a decade (or less frequent) burns.
False. Humid Mediterranean forest is designed to be fireproof. Mediterranean has aquatic ecosystems also.
I'll repeat again here. Some Mediterranean biocenoses are shaped by fire. Not all. Other NOT.
And shaped by fire means that they can stand fire, they can even promote it, and are frozen in its current state by fire. This does not mean that this is the better, or only possible outcome for that place. Ecosystems are always trying to reach the most higher level of organization possible. And those are very humid, even in Mediterranean climates.
I'm not sure what your argument is trying to accomplish- its pretty clesr to anyone reading that the discussion is about how the ecosystem has evolved such that forest fires are an important and integral part of maintaining equilibrium, and pushing the system into disequilibrium is a root cause of the current fire disaster. I could at least respect a pedantic technically correct argument, but technically, ecosystems arent trying to reach any level of organization and the concept of "better" does not apply to ecosystems- theres no moral or other ranking to biomes!
Such concept exists and is a clear one in fact. In ecology is called the climax of an ecosystem.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climax_community#Continuing_us...
If urban sprawl is the root cause of not conducting these, there should be more regulation and accountability on a small govt scale. They are the ones who approve/decline developer plans. Sounds like there may be a tragedy of the commons game theory issue here where certain counties are cashing in on local development projects while offloading the risk to outside counties.
I don't claim to be an expert, but I've talked to oldfarts^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d people (partnered with First Peoples) who have designed controlled burns, forest management experts with degrees in the topic, and even folks who run timber companies... and it's known there's a lot that could be done, but... the Santa Cruz and West Sonoma redwood fires are unprecedented. It takes a lot to get those coastal forests ablaze... enough that you're not going to get a controlled burn in Cazadero, Bonny Doon, or Empire Grade. They (unlike the interior) don't typically burn more than every 50-100 years. You can log reasonably large areas and remove underbrush, but in a wildfire like these last few weeks the flames can jump miles and that's too much area to safely log (mud slides) or regularly burn. Big Creek lost a lot of good timber in well managed forest that didn't stop the fires.
I'm also confused by the idea that if the same areas of Napa and Lake county could just burn a few more times then they wouldn't burn the next few years. It hasn't worked the last 3 times (really check caltopo for the burn overlap). It's just low brush that grows back quickly, because all of the trees that were on it have been burnt off. Then you get to Sierras where the pine beetle has created huge areas of kindling... but where was that beetle 300 years ago? Not in the Americas. How invested were the Miwok in stationary real estate? Not so much, it was a different time and a different attitude.
This all just has the ring of climate change denial...
Walking around redwood groves of 1000 year old trees with burn scars, the reality is that California ecology has always had 'cleansing' fires. The humans, the abysmal electric grid that starts a lot of the fires and building in fire plains have predictable results in amplifying that at this time of year.
Paradise (which used to be called 'pair of dice') is one of the most dangerous places to live in California, a combination of winds, canyons and narrow roads. They've had endless fires in that part of the world, but more people moved there (cheap) and when the 1912 pge power pylon fell over on a 45% wooded hill the inevitable happened. Most of Houston Texas is built on a flood plain, yet people will be astounded and appalled when they have a 100 year flood and the UK Guardian etc will blame it on global warming...
Pretty obvious in retrospect, confusing that we're still doing it, unclear how we'd reverse it, probably no good way out...
...maybe I'm just being cynical, but that's often how disasters are handled. e.g. https://www.insurancehotline.com/resources/should-government...
But, not. Fire. Fire is a lot of fun. We need to send more CO2 to the air ASAP. How could we renounce to the lovely smell of barbecues?.
After all, that debris has to get moved somewhere, or it is just more fuel. Further, what are you running the wood chipper with? Where are you getting it from? How are the people doing the work getting there?
Planned/properly engineered burns just work, and the only reason they stopped was an accumulation of humanity that refused to adapt to the ecological needs of their environment to an excessive degree.
I'll concede we're now in the territory of arguing what constitutes "excessive" degree, which to me is any cessation of activity that tends to increase ecological stability over time, rendering an area unfit or overly risky for human population or sustainable economic/ecological value extraction. I'm generally open to a lot of pro-environmental policies as long as knock-on effects are generally counted into the equation, but your wood chipper idea falls foul of A) seeming to glance over them with little scrutiny, B) not taking into account the ecology of the area.
It really does sound like a fundamentally people driven problem.
I’m not sure that the US education system gets even that far as I know many state education systems say that many slaves enjoyed being slaves...
Out of those many state education systems, would you mind naming one of them? A reference would be nice.
Trump is brazen, you now have political coverage to be just as brazen to fix these issues. We should be expecting more from our leaders because what we have now is a poor rationalization for shitty leadership. 16 of the past 20 years have been record breaking fires in California, this isn't a new problem. It's just long overdue to be solved.
P.S. I have zero faith that this will be fixed. It's fairly clear to me that the entire political servants aren't actually leading, they're apathetic while the country literally burns. It's not a difficult thing to ask that our elected leaders stop this in the short-term, let alone the long-term. It's difficult when we rationalize their bullshit, so expect more.
Is there any indication that this is caused by shortage of funds? Policy is what is preventing proper forest management. Compared to building highways and state-funded healthcare, forest raking and related tasks are cheap.
The problem isn't the pine needles, the problem is the 25 ton tree trucks laying everywhere...
Raking the ground is useless, empty busy work.
States don't have the luxury to just print money. For example, California uses inmates to supplement their firefighting workforce and at least 9 States have come to our aid this season, due to covid19 reducing that slave/prison labor.
I wouldn't call it 'policy' that prevents OR and WA. Most likely true in CA. I'd call it lack of desire. Most politicians aim for the most popular ideas that help get them reelected, not something prudent.
I don't care if I get down voted. Even if the West Coast wasn't in drier conditions, this would still be a problem. Not only that, I'm skeptical that WA is that dry. Maybe in select places but I'm very skeptical, maybe the heat changed the situation as well (record highs all throughout the West Coast prior to these fires).
Look, if you aren't blaming your leaders while things are this bad. How can you praise them when things are good? This is your life. This is your health. This is you and your families future. The blame falls on them, full stop.
The fact that the Governor didn't threaten the Bay/Tech Sector with steep taxes if they don't help fix it, is another stupid move. This isn't rocket science. This isn't something too far for humanity to solve. If you care about your State, be patriot and save it from the fires.
We're in crisis after crisis, yet no one is actually leading. Good luck having a State with 2 more decades of this. If you didn't murder them through gross negligence then you destroyed their lungs/health with all this smoke.
Gov Newsom signed a thing to allow prisoners to accept a low paying job as a firefighter? Seriously? Why not argue with your legislature and work on behalf of the people? That's right, no one gives a damn and if you think to the contrary, what actions have they done that make you think that?
Did you know a lot of residential new construction, in CA, is in fire prone areas? This is because...? Good leaders? Or are the people going to demand more from their leaders?
That's not true. The blame falls on the voters who keep voting for those clowns, one after another in a parade of lies, greed, and obfuscation, all for the promised, immediate benefits.
If I was in prison, I'd take such a job voluntarily. I'd much prefer working outdoors on something useful than rotting away in a concrete box.
> is in fire prone areas?
My understanding is that the risk of your house burning down can be greatly reduced with some fairly inexpensive design and materials changes. This can be done via the building code.
I could be wrong.
I remember a couple of decades ago people were talking about how they weren't allowed to clear or perform controlled burns on the dead underbrush. People can think they are doing good but are actually being shortsighted, causing more problems than they fix.
It’s a mess; the state and local government should do more, but also the feds, people should stop building up so much in the woods, etc. lots of blame in a complicated situation with no easy answers.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/08/13/california-u-s-forest-serv...
As this article notes, controlled burns are an important tool, and based on personal observation they seem vastly underused today compared to the frequency with which we used to see them in the past. We also need responsible forest management to thin trees and clear brush. We also need proper management (or funding) of power utilities, which have been responsible for many wildfires on the West coast - and I don’t mean just PG&E in CA (see https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-sparked-at-least-1-500-cal...), as some recent fires in WA were also sparked by power lines downed by trees that were too close and poorly managed. We also need relaxed regulations for private land owners - I know home owners in WA who were prevented from removing dangerous trees on their land and the difficult, expensive, time consuming process of getting permits caused them to give up and ignore the trees ultimately until they naturally fell. Unfortunately I had a tree fall on my house that my neighbor ignored for the same reasons.
It feels to me like basic common sense techniques to prevent wildfires have been abandoned, and rules intended to protect the environment have backfired in some cases.
Forestry management works: WaPo has noted that Finland does a lot better than its neighbors when it comes to wildfires due to controlled burns and compartmentalization of forests (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/11/19/why-finland-...). That compartmentalizations comes in part from a dense forest road network that makes the forests accessible and has also subdivided them (https://www.is.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005903733.html). Another interesting note is that Trump was widely ridiculed for his “raking” comment, but he was somewhat correct, although he misunderstood the term. Visit a clear cut of a timber stand in WA or OR and you’ll see a tangled mess left on the ground (brush, branches, stumps) that’ll dry up into a mass of fuel waiting for a spark. In Finland, they invest in clearing the land of what would otherwise be prime forest fire fuel in a process known as a “root rake” (see example video of machinery at https://youtu.be/o_EZeAiy3ew).
Voters need to draw more attention to preventative techniques and ask that funds be redirected accordingly. In Washington state, our Department of Natural Resources has been asking for increased investment in managing the fuel load and thinning forests for years (see https://www.dnr.wa.gov/StrategicFireProtection). The private forestry industry also has been asking for increased investment/assistance from the state in thinning and prescribed burns (http://www.wfpa.org/sustainable-forestry/reduce-wildfire-ris...). However these calls have been ignored, despite ever increasing state budgets, and our governor and legislature have done little to address the issue. Please contact your representatives and don’t let them get ...
Don't y'all remember between 2012 and 2017 the west coast went through a MASSIVE DROUGHT? Are Californians really this forgetful?
The constant dry heat waves killing off large swaths of our forests is the thing that is now providing the tinder for our massive fires. Other states like Washington, Oregon, and Idaho are experiencing the same thing. It's not just California.
I've been here a long time and I don't ever remember experiencing smoke smothering our cities for weeks on end until these past few years.
Calling out forest management like it's some sort of magic bullet is kind of like telling individuals to stop using straws to clean up ocean waste.
Sure, it might help a little but it doesn't really solve the root cause systemic issue: Climate Change.
Or, ahem, gasoline on the fire.
This isn’t meant to dissuade anyone from voting on Nov 3. On the contrary, I firmly believe that the future of our civilization rests on the outcome.
We need a clear headed, science-heeding majority of legislators in congress come January, plus a president willing to sign their legislation into law.
We are out of time. Shit cake or chocolate, this is it.
It's not just this election we need concern our selves with, but all those after it too.
One party denies climate change, the other acknowledges it at least.
One result opens the door, the other closes it.
The election will absolutely decide our fate.
But I agree with you regarding continuing to push after the election. If by some chance we can get the door open, it'll take continued social pressure & outreach to truly make progress.
Climate change is not the root cause here, it is an amplifier. Which means we need to plan for the effects of climate change too. And the only hope to slow climate change is a global effort, or at the very least on a country level. California closes nuclear power plants earlier than expected and then LA county buys 18% of its electricity from Utah generated on coal plants.
Did we just get lucky somehow between the Gold Rush and 2018?
I agree w/ you on global effort for climate change. Hopefully we can get started on a National level soon.
This stuff was not uncommon over the hundreds of years of this country's history. As other commenters have mentioned, it's lasted for decades in the American East, West, and particularly Midwest.
Climate change is an issue, but saying this stuff never happens and (presumably human-led) climate change is the sole reason is not really likely to be true.
And of course other effects like PG&E not maintaining their grid => unnecessary fires; more people live in forests => more deadly/damaging fires; etc.
As usual, looking at data and scientific consensus will help, I just hope we start doing so sooner, rather than later
You'd expect maybe after 30 or 40 years in 1900, we would have seen the massive statewide fires like we have now.
But I find it hard to believe we have to wait all the way until 2017 to see the results of "fighting fires"
How much does that contribute to the general aridness of the area?
Now we are suffering from that ideological purity stupidity. The forests were just a bomb waiting to go off and at least in the Bay Area were triggered by the massive number of lightning strikes.
Some additional points.
This isn’t due to urban encroachment. Just look at the number and extent of the forest fires. They are basically everywhere including areas with very few people.
Forest fires are a natural occurrence but our actions tilted it toward massive fires and massive numbers of simultaneous fires.
Must we again suffer from ideological purity stupidity? This isn’t directly caused by global warming.
Edit: people who downvote because this strikes too close to home are sad