I just got asked for the nth time about what I think about the comparison between CA wildfire CO2 emissions in 2018 and our state's climate goals. I think the comparison is misguided in at least two important respects.

First, fossil fuels are largely carbon from plants that grew and were buried in the Cretaceous. Forest carbon is cycling between plants and the atm on a timescale of decades. There's no putting the Cretaceous CO2 back in the ground. Not true for forests that burn - they regrow.

Second, the way the forest CO2 emissions data is presented implies that emissions could/should be zero. But that's just totally wrong. The reason wildfire emissions are high is that we didn't allow "good" fire for too long. The baseline isn't zero; it should be prescribed fire.

There is something deeply ahistoric and structurally racist about all this. Infrequently mentioned is the millennia of living with and using fire in CA prior to the theft of native lands. That's what "native" CA was, not the depopulated landscape of John Muir's writings.

Last thing to say is that this is not intended as a criticism of @AirResources, who assembles the wildfire CO2 estimate. They know all this, are hamstrung by the laws they have to enforce, and are active participants in the FMTF, which is trying to make this better for CA.