California's on fire. Again.

It doesn't have to be.

There's overwhelming, longstanding scientific consensus that California fires are due to a century-long aversion to controlled burns, and yet the state is vapor-locked when it comes to doing something with that knowledge.

1/

Writing in @Propublica, @lizweil sums up the entire situation in six words: "The state is in the hole."

California has a century of fire debt, compounded by climate change. It's gonna burn. How that happens is up to us.

https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen#992135

2/

Controlled burns are politically impossible (for now), thanks to "culture, greed, liability laws and good intentions gone awry." Since 1905, California has "made war on nature," starting with the genocide of First Nations people who had tended the land with fire.

3/

After the 1906 SF quake and the fires that killed 300,000, California adopted a fire policy more like "a field surgeon wielding a bone saw than a preventive medicine specialist with a tray full of vaccines."

4/

Where there is war, there are profiteers, and the same military-industrial complex that has perfected Beltway Banditry has also turned fire into commerce, with Cal Fire budgets heading to $1B this year, much of showered on the likes of Lockheed Martin.

5/

Perversely, most of this money is spent on "air shows" that dump fire-suppressant on forests that are overdue for burning, doing nothing but exacerbating the problem (not even saving inhabited areas).

6/

And while prison laborers earn slave wages risking life and limb to fight fires, Cal Fire's salaried workforce average $148k/year and periodically, these firefighters have turned arsonist, starting fires.

7/

The perps are usually characterized as deranged, but may simply be looking for overtime.

Contrast this money-making juggernaut with controlled burns. When megafires blaze, contractors don't have to get permits to drive into wooded areas, or fill in impact statements.

8/

Controlled burns aren't emergencies and don't generate overtime pay, and megafires are never shut down because there's a lot of particulate that day such that a burn would push pollution over the Clean Air Act's PM2.5 threshold.

9/

But controlled burns allow residents with breathing issues to leave town, they allow for mask stockpiling, they can be scheduled around major events or the school year. The pollution from controlled burns is "minuscule" when compared to wildfires.

10/

But a burn boss who never sets a controlled burn faces no consequences, while the burn boss whose controlled burn goes awry can get into serious trouble.

11/

Despite all this, there's still inaction. Gov Newsom's Memo of Understanding from earlier this month is toothless. The last Quadrennial Fire Review predicted that California would continue its course of inaction until a fire wiped out a city on the scale of San Diego.

12/

California needs to burn a million acres to dig itself out of the hole of a century's worth of fire debt.

Some people are forming burn co-ops and creating burner certification programs, creating a volunteer corps of controlled burners.

13/

"You won’t find any climate deniers on the fire line." -Tim Ingalsbee, founder, Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology

eof/