Comment by darknavi 9 days ago
> This week, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed.
It sounds like it's a resourcing issue, not a change in philosophy. It doesn't change the fact that it won't be happening though.
Sadly no, and (IANAL) the law here is clear AFAIK. Money cannot be spent outside of what it was allocated. Firefighting I'm given to understand explicitly excludes prevention. This might be one of the most short sighted budget allocations I've ever seen. As a dollar spent on prevention easily covers 10 on fighting.
Can the Forest Service make this up with use fees? Like, could California pay the Forest Service to take care of its land surrounded by California?
Here in Oregon (and elsewhere), we have multi-agency partnerships between governments, different federal agencies, local tribes, homeowners, etc.:
https://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationPractices/Fi...
I'm not sure how it works in California, but wildfires don't really care about our jurisdictional boundaries...
It could possibly be managed by the state by placing a tax on fire insurance which would basically be a workaround to Proposition 13. That would probably be about as popular as a Chinese "weather" balloon but it does have a certain poetry of having the people who use the forest — by living in it — pay to manage it.
The fire insurance that is unaffordable or just straight not available anymore to those same people?
People living in the forest (who’s doing this exactly? you didn’t specify) are not the problem. Wildfires are a natural event meant to bring balance to an overgrown forest. All of CA suffers from this so why force only some to pay?
Since CA tends to be a rich state, I vote that those living in SF and LA pay 75% of the required fees, and the remainder of the state pay the rest.
They can use the lumber fees from the forests to pay for the cost.
This would be true if the federal allowed more than a nominal amount of logging. Most trees and logs come from private land. See page 8: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45688
> Not without Congress doing something to enable it
Why? We played with the farfetched hypothetical of California unilaterally acting on federal land. But if the Forest Service says “come on in” and they do, I’m struggling to see who would face any real consequences given the Congress’s power of the purse isn’t being touched.
They're still going broke despite using prison labor to fight the fires?
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/31/us/prison-inmates-fight-calif...
If they stopped funding that completely it would halt the problem. Fire is part of nature.
So is death. Interestingly we've responded by trying to minimize it where rational. Part of preventing fire is preventing death. Fires also shut down roads which can be a major problem where alternative routes don't exist.
A wholesale "do not prescribed burn" is not sensible. Determining which areas are high and low value and then concentrating what resources you have on the highest value areas is.
No my point is stop overfunding firefighting. Over fund forest management.
Your point of stopping fire suppression has something to it.
Though, 3 issues I see with complete disengagement: (1) there are whole towns that would burn down, avoidably so if some fires were not suppressed
(2) modern fires are rangers and turn the landscape into Savannah. This is not necessary. Healthy forests would be fire resistant and more fires could just run their course (in other words, not suppressing fires can lead to CA forests being removed)
(3) kinda related to (2), the wet/dry seasons creates a lot of burnabke grasses and bushes that pop up. Prescribed burns would tamp that down, giving forests more time to age and be fire resistant
Fire is part of nature, but many of these fires are caused by target shooters, OHV users, and even from home construction. It doesn't make sense to take torches to the forest and then claim it's fine because fire is natural.
Fire is going to happen. The more you prevent fire the bigger the fire becomes when it does happen.
Trees and empty land cost nothing. But:
CA Insurance Claims USFS Wildfire
Year and Settlements Management Budget
2018 $13.6 billion $2.5 billion
2019 $2.8 billion $2.4 billion
2020 $3.5 billion $2.35 billion
2021 $4.75 billion $2.4 billion
2022 (unknown) $2.65 billion
2023 (unknown) $2.97 billion
It is a little complicated, but it isn't that complicated. The simple question is, should the government pay a safe home's price for a burnt down home?
No. Let owners exercise owner's responsibility (e.g. insurance, and if insurance is too expensive -- well, the risk is too high).
PS: I heard the thing California does, however, is putting a cap on insurance premiums, so insurers just avoid some regions, and owners cannot find insurance to buy. It's kinda the same thing -- owner's responsibility.
At least you’re answering the question.
California FAIR is the insurance of last resort so what you’re saying isn’t totally accurate.
There has to be an insurance option because you can’t get a mortgage without insurance. And owner occupied real estate prices do not go up without mortgages.
California bends over backwards to make owner occupied real estate risk free.
More provocative questions: what is the difference between someone who lost a home in a place guaranteed for the home to eventually burn down, and someone who doesn’t own a home at all? In that moment: nothing, right? Why is sunk cost a fallacy all the time, except that time?
Is someone who pays less in taxes deserving of less, more or equal government assistance? No, right? Now replace taxes with “compulsory payments” like home insurance: does your answer change?
This should illuminate for you why CA wildfire bailout policy is so inequitable. These communities are not an escape valve from overpriced real estate in California cities, they ARE the overpriced real estate all the same.
AFAIK in CA insurance rates must be set based on historical trends not anticipated future losses or reinsurance prices. It is easy to imagine why - insurance companies love to play financial games when they can. Historical data is lagging by nature and the reinsurance market predicts large fires will continue thus the insurers get hit from both sides.
Note that a lot of the property insurance regulation stems from a 1988 voter proposition. I suppose it has worked fine from then until now but the CA drought and greatly increased fire risk was an unexpected shock.
FWIW I would guess that we won't see extreme fire events for some time going forward - probably not until a "big drought" comes back to CA 30-40 years from now. The reinsurance market will settle down and mutual insurance companies will end up issuing refunds eventually.
The camp fire was caused by a failed hook on lines where similar hooks showed extreme wear-and-tear, despite PG&E claiming to have inspected them recently. It's not like we just decided to say it was PG&E's fault; their inspections were clearly missing important deferred maintenance.
If the fire had been caused by someone without the funds to pay for damages (e.g. a homeless encampment (Day Fire) or college students improperly extinguishing an illegal bonfire (Tea fire)), then there might be criminal charges, but insurance companies will be on the hook.
So some random person lost their job because they didn’t actually do the inspection and now everybody in northern CA pays higher rates. Do you see what you did there? Who do you think won here?
People will not start doing proper inspections until you punish the individual harshly, instead of the company.
My point was that twofold:
1. torts often fail to make people whole, and even when they do, they aren't always a good deterrent.
2. The comment I was replying to implied that SCE was a scapegoat for the Camp Fire; all evidence strongly suggests that this is not the case.
Bad philosophy. Less prescribed burns mean more uncontrollable wildfires which means in the long term costs are even higher.
Prescribed burns are expensive now because we haven't done them for so long. California banned the indigenous practice of cultural burns before it was even a state! But the more we work on restoring this practice the cheaper it'll be for everyone in the long term
Enshittification strikes again. In this case, fees and costs go down by virtue of being pushed out into the future as even higher costs as a result of lack of fees being paid now. Someone should make an encyclopedia or reference doc detailing all the different and specific ways Enshittification manifests. Bonus points if they tie it into Socialism/Communism because I'd bet there is a high degree of overlap between the two in terms of failure modes.
The USFS (Department of Agriculture) never had enough resources. The amount of land is almost unprotectable: California: 20 million acres Idaho: 20 million Oregon: 16 million. Fighting fires really should be a state job. I think Idaho delivers much better results for resources spent, in areas that are more vulnerable. California is dysfunctional when it comes to multiple teams and agencies working together, and making decisions that could be controversial. I suspect USFS is relieved to interact less.
Climate change absolutely increases the fire risk:
Fire activity in Australia is strongly affected by high inter-annual climate variability and extremes. Through changes in the climate, anthropogenic climate change has the potential to alter fire dynamics. Here we compile satellite (19 and 32 years) and ground-based (90 years) burned area datasets, climate and weather observations, and simulated fuel loads for Australian forests. Burned area in Australia’s forests shows a linear positive annual trend but an exponential increase during autumn and winter.
The mean number of years since the last fire has decreased consecutively in each of the past four decades, while the frequency of forest megafire years (>1 Mha burned) has markedly increased since 2000.
The increase in forest burned area is consistent with increasingly more dangerous fire weather conditions, increased risk factors associated with pyroconvection, including fire-generated thunderstorms, and increased ignitions from dry lightning, all associated to varying degrees with anthropogenic climate change.
Multi-decadal increase of forest burned area in Australia is linked to climate change, Nature, Nov 2021, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27225-4
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2021/november/new-rese...
This is a very convenient global scapegoat for those responsible for mismanaging the forests here and now. Nobody is disputing these studies. But then Newsom comes out and instead if saying "it's my fault for underinvesting in fire prevention, i will personally see that prevention (not just fighting) gets funded properly today", he says "too bad, it's all climate change's fault", how does that look?
Language usage wise, something (or someone) is not a scapegoat if it shares responsibility.
Has he come out and blamed everything on climate change and not invested in both prevention measures (better management, backburning, etc.) and fire fighting?
That's poor policy regardless of underlying causes.
Here in Australia there are multiple causes driving bushfires, the single largest cause related to frequency and intensity increases is far and away AGW. This doesn't result in Land Management agencies rolling up shop and giving up.
Not sure what the governor has to do with the USFS.
This isn't actually a very good attribution to specifically anthropogenic global warming. But it is a decent one to anthropogenic factors broadly. The metaphor of laying a fire is quite literal here: if global warming increases the number of sparks, that's actually the smaller piece of the problem. The bigger one is mismanagement of forest and ecological disruption leading to more and bigger fires laid for those sparks to catch.
My guess is there could be future impacts around the condition of forests that leads to susceptibility. Drought comes to mind as a serious risk. But a forest of dry trees is still a much harder environment for wildfires to form and spread than a forest of dry trees and no proper forestry to manage it.
> ... to blame the conflagration on 'climate change' ...
Climate change is a significant factor in wildfire statistics. So is forest management.
Apologies to your political bloodthirst, but it's a bipartisan issue. Texas, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and Idaho are in the top ten, along with California, Colorado, Washington, Montana, and Oregon.
It's a particularly irrelevant question for this specific article, given that it's about Federal land and it's been a persistent issue regardless of which party holds national power.
> It's a particularly irrelevant question for this specific article, given that it's about Federal land and it's been a persistent issue regardless of which party holds national power.
I tend to agree that it's a bipartisan issue. However, the solutions will tend to fray along party lines. Ultimately, politics comes into play regardless of how bipartisan a problem is.
Famously, Donald Trump initially said "let it burn" when prompted for what to do about California wildfires. It was only after learning from his aides that there were more Republicans in California than many other red states combined that he reversed course. That alone makes for a pretty good reason for asking the original question.
> It sounds like it's a resourcing issue, not a change in philosophy.
Yes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41920127 ("HN: The Forest Service Is Losing 2,400 Jobs–Including Most of Its Trail Workers")
Relevant comment by S201: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41922195
"The overall Forest Service budget has indeed been increasing, but it's nearly all going to wildfire fighting. I recently wrote about the state of forest road funding and went in depth on this here: https://ephemeral.cx/2024/09/losing-access-to-the-cascades
> Overall, in 1995 16% of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to wildfires. By 2015 it was 52% and by 2025 it’s projected to be upwards of 67%. Without large amounts of additional funding it is virtually guaranteed that the Forest Service’s budget will continue to be siphoned away by firefighting needs."