California's
Deadliest Fires Could Have Been Mitigated By Prevention, by Chuck DeVore,
11/16/18.
At least 63 people have been killed with
631 reported missing in the California fires as thousands of firefighters,
including 200 sent from Texas as well as other states, battle to contain the
blazes. More than 7,000 structures have been destroyed, including up to 90
percent of the homes in Paradise, population 26,682, in Northern California’s
Butte County. More than a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in
both the north of the state by the Camp Fire and by other fires in Southern
California, Hill and Woolsey.
Sparks
from damaged or malfunctioning power lines operated by PG&E, a
state-regulated electric utility, may have been to blame for the Camp Fire’s
ignition amidst rugged federally-managed lands to the east of Paradise.
As
California’s fire season burst back into the headlines, President Trump
generated controversy with a weekend tweet emphasizing the role of forest management
in these fires:
There is no reason for these
massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest
management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many
lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or
no more Fed payments!" But
here is why it matters.
In
my two decades of service with the California Army National Guard, we used to
darkly joke that California’s four seasons were flood, fire, earthquake and
riot. California’s rainy season will follow soon after these fires, triggering
deadly mudslides on the steep hills now being denuded of vegetation. Mudslides,
moving fast and with little warning, have historically caused greater loss
of life than fire.
Politics
takes no timeout amidst the flame and smoke, and human policy bears part of the
blame for this years’ tragic toll of life and loss of property. When deadly
fires were burning last August, Mike Marcucci, the assistant chief of CAL
FIRE, California’s main firefighting agency, noted in an interview with the CBS affiliate in San
Francisco that, “It’s a daunting task that we’re working with some of our
cooperators (i.e. federal and
local authorities) to make sure we can get some of those trees out
of the way to not add to some of the fuel.”
CAL
FIRE experts expanded on the problem by blaming decades of policy that
discouraged controlled burns to reduce the fuel load in the now-burning forests
in the north and hillsides in the south, creating tinderbox conditions. Some
of the needed prescribed burns in Southern California’s coastal chaparral and
grasslands have been deterred by environmental lawsuits and air quality
concerns.
The
federal government controls 46 percent of California’s land, much of it managed
by the U.S. Forest Service. In the three decades before 1990, foresters harvested
10-12 billion board feet
of timber from national forests every year. By 2013, restrictive environmental
policies cut that to 2.5 billion. While the harvest declined, so too did tree
thinning and the clearing of brush and diseased trees.
The
Trump administration is reversing that trend with the biggest harvest of
trees on federal land in 20 years,
selling 3.4 billion board feet on some 3 million acres—still just a third of
the typical pre-1990 harvest.
Harvesting
trees on public land is controversial but helps pay for needed brush clearing.
Many environmental groups vigorously oppose both. But fighting the larger,
hotter fires that result without active forest management is even more costly
and threatens lives.
In
California, tighter environmental controls, higher prices for timber harvesting
permits and competition from overseas and pine forests in American Southeast
led to a collapse of the state's timber industry. Employment in the
industry in 2017 was half of what it was in the 1990s.
During
this summer’s fires, outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown blamed the
record-breaking fires on climate change. In a press conference he warned that
the level of climate change-induced forest fires predicted in 20 to 30 years
were “now occurring in real time.”
While
the frequency of fire has
declined, the area
burnt and the cost to fight wildfires have increased. Understanding why this is
the case is the critical component in crafting a public policy solution to
address the issue of deadly forest fires.
Many
urban liberals are calling for higher taxes on rural Californians to pay for
firefighting.
Rather
than higher taxes, one solution to the constant forest management funding
shortage in California would be to look to the state’s multibillion-dollar
cap-and-trade program designed to address global greenhouse gas emissions.
California’s
out of control wildfires may have emitted up to 50 million metric tons of
carbon dioxide this year alone, about one-eighth of the entire state’s annual
emissions,
largely wiping out two decades of the state’s hard fought
greenhouse gas reductions for 2018. Plus, unlike a natural gas-powered electric
plant or a modern car, the fires cause terrible air quality.
California’s
cap-and-trade program is now taxing some $1.5 billion a year from the state’s
economy. The lion’s share of that revenue has gone towards California’s
High-Speed Rail project. Until the fires this summer, none of the money had
been allocated for forest management or controlled burns to reduce the fuel
load until a modest $170 million was announced in August after the last round
of big fires.
Rather
than continue to fund a government rail project that that was promised as
needing no tax money to build and operate, California’s elected officials
should consider prioritizing a consistent stream of cap-and-trade revenue to
more actively manage the state’s millions of acres of forestland and coastal
chaparral. Prevention saves lives.
Chuck
DeVore is Vice President of National Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy
Foundation. He was a California Assemblyman and is a Lt. Colonel in the U.S.
Army Retired Reserve.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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