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by DisjointedHunt 1710 days ago
How much carbon does one year of fires in California produce? For all the regulations on reducing usage, the wise politicians enabled conditions through neglect of forest care and trimming to allow fires so large, the plume could be seen from space and darkened skies as far north as Seattle.

The point here is, what is good for the climate isn’t the purview of these simplistic views of climate science.

Drilling a well doesn’t automatically kill everything Mother Nature created or anything. . . The economic shift that Tesla single handful brought about to get all of traditional auto to move to electric cannot be overstated.

So stop using “The Environment” as a battering ram that only your point of view protects. It is wrong.

3 comments

>the wise politicians enabled conditions through neglect of forest care and trimming

It baffles me that this is so often repeated when it is quite clearly inaccurate if you just think about it for a second.

First of all, you don't "trim" a forest the size of many small countries. This isn't a city park. It would take every man, woman, and child's sum efforts to 'landscape' even a fraction of the forests in the PNW. That's like saying that the reason the sea is rising is that nobody is running an ice cube maker to refreeze the ice caps.

But to speak to the real origination of this point - resource extraction for the benefit of those who control the cable news narrative: You don't prevent forest fires by logging. That is an old meme from the resource extraction industry - not only does it not prevent wildfires, it also destroys biodiversity of the ecosystems where old, diverse growth is replaced with pine stands.

Forest fires are required for the natural lifecycle of a forest - there are species that cannot reproduce without a forest fire. Not only small brush type plants that thrive in the absence of overgrowth but also the largest organisms in the forest- the trees themselves! Vast areas of the PNW are dominated by so-called 'serotinous cone' deciduous trees whose cones will lay dormant for years, coated in a thick plastic-like resin layer that only allows the cone to release seeds after the resin is melted away by forest fire (when the chances of successfully growing are highest)

Forests require fires to be healthy. A big part of why wildfires are so bad now is that we haven't let them happen for so long because there are more and more people moving into the areas that previously experienced healthy burns. This lead practices to try to prevent fires from happening. Meanwhile, brush built up year after year after year and eventually the fires that do happen are orders of magnitude worse. Climate change and the resulting temperatures and changes in the 'moisture battery' throughout the year are also massive contributors, but that is a whole other post.

Thanks. Do you have any good sources on the topic that I can read? I would love to cut through all the politicized BS.
Carbon from forest fires is part of the short-term carbon cycle because it came out of the atmosphere quite recently. It is fundamentally different from carbon found underground that was deposited before humans existed.
Filed under non sequitur.