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> California's mismanagement with its forest is the same issue. I agree that the forests should be managed differently, but if this being "California's mismana

by biztos 6y ago

> California's mismanagement with its forest is the same issue. I agree that the forests should be managed differently, but if this being "California's mismanagement" is an actual thing as opposed to political disinformation, I'd love to see a couple links to back it up. Some quick googling suggests that it's mostly a Federal problem, which has very different implications especially right now. Am I wrong?

bluGill 6y ago
blame the feds, blame CA, blame the natural state of forests in CA... Any way too much blame is on PG&E.
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  What an odd sentiment...
  - pixl97 6y ago
    Why? There is such a thing as a multi domain fault. He never said this wasn't PG&E's fault, just that out of 100% they don't bear all the fault. I mean, California is in the middle of burning down from a lighting complex at this moment. Suing mother nature isn't going to do much good if you want to put the blame on her for that fire. As long as people live in the Wildland Urban Interface, and we live in a climate that's getting hotter and drier year over year, and we don't have defense in depth around our homes, houses are going to continue to burn and people will die from it. At the end of the day we cannot stop the fires, they are a natural part of the landscape. The question is can we reduce the impact on humans? Some we cannot, the smoke will still affect us negatively. Some we can, a hard parameter around our house with no flammable bushes, and eves that protect against cinder build up that set houses on fire will help.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      The twitter thread makes this exact point. The camp fire would likely have happened with or without this maintenance error on PG&E's part. This is because a tree fell on a different power line and started the Camp B fire, and this was determined not to be the result of a preventable error. Just that fact alone suggests that the main component of the problem is not PG&E's neglect.
      - jvanderbot 6y ago
        Do you believe we should not penalize preventable deaths just because non-preventable deaths also happen?
        tikhonj 6y ago
        That's not the question here. Rather, it's about which causes contributed to the problem—blaming everything on the most proximate cause is convenient but doesn't reflect the situation. An extreme analogy: if a car is built in a way that a fender-bender causes a fire[1], how much of that is on the person who cause the fender-bender? Fender-benders are preventable by better driving, but the consequences were massively exaggerated because the car was unsafe. The PG&E example isn't this clear but if the severity of the fires is substantially caused by poor forest management—an empirical question to which I do not know the answer—then it's clear that PG&E should not shoulder the entire blame. We're still left with the thorny question of how much blame they deserve (certainly not none), but the rhetoric I see around it is using the company as a scapegoat to let the CA and federal government avoid taking any responsibility at all. [1]: I don't know if the Ford Pinto was actually this bad, but this is a hypothetical example anyway :).
        jvanderbot 6y ago
        There are laws about negligence and inspection for utilities. There should be laws about forest management, I suppose, but the law is what determines culpability, not the cofactor analysis of the actual problem root. In the fender-bender example, I can see how you would structure your logic the way you have. As an example of how I and others might structure it: The car causes the accident when a wheel falls off, and the accident happens to happen where there was a prior gas spill. The presence of the gas spill is unfortunate, but the car caused the accident, and that should never happen with good design and maintenance. The accident was exacerbated by the presence of gas, causing a fire and injury and death, etc. Now, to bring it full circle. Replace a car with a train (the situation is largely under the control of a single company), the accident with a train falling off the rails and hitting a gas pipeline, AND the company knew the gas pipeline was there, and knew the danger all along, and still managed to not put on a proper maintenance plan to ensure the train didn't derail especially in a place that has a gas pipeline right there.
    - jschwartzi 6y ago
      The fires are a direct result of human-caused climate change. I’ve lived in Washington all my life and 2015 was the first year we got smoked out during the summer. Since then it’s persisted year after year. We’ve completely screwed up our planet.
      - pixl97 6y ago
        Eh, right, this is why the North American west has a 100,000 year fire record? Climate change makes the problem worse, but the fact is fires are a natural part of the regional ecology. If we keep looking at fires as one problem with one cause, we will keep dying in fires and losing houses.
      - jackhack 6y ago
        it's human-caused, all right. Just not in the way you are implying. The number of recent antifa firebugs being caught either actively setting fires or scouting along roads, matches in hand, might have some relation to this, don't you think? Ignoring the actual arrests, it's not a stretch to think the types that set urban fires might also do the same on a rural area. Look at a map of the fires. Isn't it interesting that most of these fires happen in close proximity to state highways and secondary roads and not in unpopulated rural areas? Not willing to admit the obvious? Then, let's go baack to your claim that it's due to climate. You should be able to describe the specific climate changes have occurred in the past 5 years to cause this dramatic increase in fires where the occurrence was rare, before. That should be an easy data point for you to call out. Or if that's too challenging, what specific climate variable must change to increase fire. Speculate, if you like. Educate us all. But I think Ockham's Razor applies here.
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  Crazily dysfunctional country. The elements of that blew game I got are "climate change makes weather warmer and drier, which increases risk" question about that Mr. Trump said "California is terrible in clearing out the forests" to which it is being responded "we need funding and many forests are federal forests" always good to work on blaming for the past, not to work on a solution for the future ...
rayiner 6y ago
What do you mean by “political disinformation?” Some news outlets you don’t like published the story? How much “moral clarity” does the outlet need to have before you’ll consider the article?
- unexaminedlife 6y ago
  I don't understand how someone could have been alive, over the last 4 years, inside a real human body with a functioning human brain and not understand the sentiment of the post you're replying to.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    The sentiment of the post is what confuses me. The idea that California wildfires are caused by forest mismanagement is being covered by many reputable news sources. The sibling posts contain four such links. Some of those sites may have ideological leanings such that they focus more on that mismanagement than climate change, but the other sources have ideological leanings so they focus more on climate change than forest mismanagement. Regardless, we’re not talking about some Russian Facebook bot here. Hence my question: do you need the New York Times to say it before you’ll believe it’s not “political disinformation?”
    - biztos 6y ago
      When the leading lights of one major US political party are loudly denying the science of climate change, and in service of that denial are claiming that the current fires in Oregon and California are the result of mismanagement by the other major party and not due even partially to climate change, then yes, as a non-expert I would like to see some responsible sources backing up a statement that appears to support the former position. Which bryan0 and zbrozek helpfully provided. I still call it disinformation coming from the President, but these sources do help make clear what CA's shared culpability here is. And no, I don't need it to be the NYT. I think it was reasonable to ask for the backup, and the fact it was given makes me think at least some people agree. I absolutely give people here the benefit of the doubt about their good intentions, but there is a context right now of national political figures working against science, often by repeating lies that might sound reasonable to some at first. I hope that helps clear up the question of sentiment. edit: clarity
macspoofing 6y ago
>I agree that the forests should be managed differently, but if this being "California's mismanagement" is an actual thing as opposed to political disinformation, I'd love to see a couple links to back it up. There are two narratives here. The Democrats want to blame Climate Change. Republicans want to blame California's mismanagement. Both are correct but there is no policy that any government could implement that will solve climate change in the next few decades. But you literally have Biden going around and blaming Trump for these fires when there is no climate policy that United States could have implemented in the last 2 decades that would have made any difference. On the other hand, regardless of climate change, California has implemented policies that created this problem and California can implement policies that will prevent future wildfires from spreading out of control. But California is a mess. Controlled burns are constantly challenged in court by activists and NIMBYs and bogged down by environmental regulations. California needs to perform controlled burns of around a million acres of land, but is doing something on the order a few thousand even with a backlog of 20 million acres[1]. Logging policy has clear-cut forest replaced with dense bush[2]. And bad vegetation management policy has been the mantra for decades in California. In this case, the Democrats are wrong and are engaging in outright lying in order to deflect blame. Climate change is an important issue, but climate change policy is not going to result in a solution for these wildfires. >Some quick googling suggests that it's mostly a Federal problem How? How is this a federal problem? [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-using-more-prescribed-burns-to-reduce-fire-risk/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-... [2] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-10-14/newsom-clear-cutting-rim-fire-california https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-10-14/newsom-clea...
- jvanderbot 6y ago
  Yes. Climate change should be met with mitigation (to avoid further climate change) and realistic adaptations of forest management. But, to make matters worse, the baseline expected rate of fires is higher due to climate change, and is much higher due to PG&E negligence. We can and should attack all factors with regulation, maintenance policy change, etc. The fact is, we had maintenance policies for PG&E's portion, and they were negligent.
bryan0 6y ago
Here are some articles explaining California's role in forest mismanagement.[0][1][2] I think what's interesting, and a real problem, is that all reasons about causes of the fires is seen as a political stance, when the factual causes of the fires should be not a political issue. All of these things are true. They're not political statements: 1. CA mismanaged its forests by not doing proper controlled burns 2. Climate change making conditions ripe for fires 3. PG&E was negligent in maintaining its infrastructure But people want to assign the blame to either #1 or (#2 and #3), and by doing that they are implicitly taking a political stance. It's not productive and makes finding robust solutions to these problems harder. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-using-more-prescribed-burns-to-reduce-fire-risk/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-... [1]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article239475468.html https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article239475468.html [2]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Top-scientist-knew-Big-Basin-was-at-risk-for-a-15514626.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Top-scientist-knew-Bi...
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  What about all the federally owned land in California suffering from the same “mismanagement?” It’s also not clear to me that - regardless of the party in question - it is fair to call it mismanagement unless credentialed people had pointed out the risk of not allowing controlled burns and the government insisted on doing them anyway because of different priorities, aka mismanagement.
  - zbrozek 6y ago
    It's not news. Fire management folks have been preaching controlled burns for decades. https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...
    - EricE 6y ago
      Whats even nuts is many types of trees only propagate with fire. Fires are required to open the cones and let the seeds out. They are actively killing the native forests by over zealous fire suppression and lack of controlled burns. Environmentalism in name only - sound and fury signifying nothing.
jaywalk 6y ago
It's more complex than that: https://reason.com/2020/09/14/western-wildfires-can-be-prevented-if-burdens-on-forest-management-are-eased/ https://reason.com/2020/09/14/western-wildfires-can-be-preve...

by biztos 6y ago

bluGill 6y ago

blame the feds, blame CA, blame the natural state of forests in CA... Any way too much blame is on PG&E.

SQueeeeeL 6y ago
What an odd sentiment...
- pixl97 6y ago
  Why? There is such a thing as a multi domain fault. He never said this wasn't PG&E's fault, just that out of 100% they don't bear all the fault. I mean, California is in the middle of burning down from a lighting complex at this moment. Suing mother nature isn't going to do much good if you want to put the blame on her for that fire. As long as people live in the Wildland Urban Interface, and we live in a climate that's getting hotter and drier year over year, and we don't have defense in depth around our homes, houses are going to continue to burn and people will die from it. At the end of the day we cannot stop the fires, they are a natural part of the landscape. The question is can we reduce the impact on humans? Some we cannot, the smoke will still affect us negatively. Some we can, a hard parameter around our house with no flammable bushes, and eves that protect against cinder build up that set houses on fire will help.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    The twitter thread makes this exact point. The camp fire would likely have happened with or without this maintenance error on PG&E's part. This is because a tree fell on a different power line and started the Camp B fire, and this was determined not to be the result of a preventable error. Just that fact alone suggests that the main component of the problem is not PG&E's neglect.
    - jvanderbot 6y ago
      Do you believe we should not penalize preventable deaths just because non-preventable deaths also happen?
      - tikhonj 6y ago
        That's not the question here. Rather, it's about which causes contributed to the problem—blaming everything on the most proximate cause is convenient but doesn't reflect the situation. An extreme analogy: if a car is built in a way that a fender-bender causes a fire[1], how much of that is on the person who cause the fender-bender? Fender-benders are preventable by better driving, but the consequences were massively exaggerated because the car was unsafe. The PG&E example isn't this clear but if the severity of the fires is substantially caused by poor forest management—an empirical question to which I do not know the answer—then it's clear that PG&E should not shoulder the entire blame. We're still left with the thorny question of how much blame they deserve (certainly not none), but the rhetoric I see around it is using the company as a scapegoat to let the CA and federal government avoid taking any responsibility at all. [1]: I don't know if the Ford Pinto was actually this bad, but this is a hypothetical example anyway :).
        jvanderbot 6y ago
        There are laws about negligence and inspection for utilities. There should be laws about forest management, I suppose, but the law is what determines culpability, not the cofactor analysis of the actual problem root. In the fender-bender example, I can see how you would structure your logic the way you have. As an example of how I and others might structure it: The car causes the accident when a wheel falls off, and the accident happens to happen where there was a prior gas spill. The presence of the gas spill is unfortunate, but the car caused the accident, and that should never happen with good design and maintenance. The accident was exacerbated by the presence of gas, causing a fire and injury and death, etc. Now, to bring it full circle. Replace a car with a train (the situation is largely under the control of a single company), the accident with a train falling off the rails and hitting a gas pipeline, AND the company knew the gas pipeline was there, and knew the danger all along, and still managed to not put on a proper maintenance plan to ensure the train didn't derail especially in a place that has a gas pipeline right there.
  - jschwartzi 6y ago
    The fires are a direct result of human-caused climate change. I’ve lived in Washington all my life and 2015 was the first year we got smoked out during the summer. Since then it’s persisted year after year. We’ve completely screwed up our planet.
    - pixl97 6y ago
      Eh, right, this is why the North American west has a 100,000 year fire record? Climate change makes the problem worse, but the fact is fires are a natural part of the regional ecology. If we keep looking at fires as one problem with one cause, we will keep dying in fires and losing houses.
    - jackhack 6y ago
      it's human-caused, all right. Just not in the way you are implying. The number of recent antifa firebugs being caught either actively setting fires or scouting along roads, matches in hand, might have some relation to this, don't you think? Ignoring the actual arrests, it's not a stretch to think the types that set urban fires might also do the same on a rural area. Look at a map of the fires. Isn't it interesting that most of these fires happen in close proximity to state highways and secondary roads and not in unpopulated rural areas? Not willing to admit the obvious? Then, let's go baack to your claim that it's due to climate. You should be able to describe the specific climate changes have occurred in the past 5 years to cause this dramatic increase in fires where the occurrence was rare, before. That should be an easy data point for you to call out. Or if that's too challenging, what specific climate variable must change to increase fire. Speculate, if you like. Educate us all. But I think Ockham's Razor applies here.
johannes1234321 6y ago
Crazily dysfunctional country. The elements of that blew game I got are "climate change makes weather warmer and drier, which increases risk" question about that Mr. Trump said "California is terrible in clearing out the forests" to which it is being responded "we need funding and many forests are federal forests" always good to work on blaming for the past, not to work on a solution for the future ...

rayiner 6y ago

What do you mean by “political disinformation?” Some news outlets you don’t like published the story? How much “moral clarity” does the outlet need to have before you’ll consider the article?

unexaminedlife 6y ago
I don't understand how someone could have been alive, over the last 4 years, inside a real human body with a functioning human brain and not understand the sentiment of the post you're replying to.
- rayiner 6y ago
  The sentiment of the post is what confuses me. The idea that California wildfires are caused by forest mismanagement is being covered by many reputable news sources. The sibling posts contain four such links. Some of those sites may have ideological leanings such that they focus more on that mismanagement than climate change, but the other sources have ideological leanings so they focus more on climate change than forest mismanagement. Regardless, we’re not talking about some Russian Facebook bot here. Hence my question: do you need the New York Times to say it before you’ll believe it’s not “political disinformation?”
  - biztos 6y ago
    When the leading lights of one major US political party are loudly denying the science of climate change, and in service of that denial are claiming that the current fires in Oregon and California are the result of mismanagement by the other major party and not due even partially to climate change, then yes, as a non-expert I would like to see some responsible sources backing up a statement that appears to support the former position. Which bryan0 and zbrozek helpfully provided. I still call it disinformation coming from the President, but these sources do help make clear what CA's shared culpability here is. And no, I don't need it to be the NYT. I think it was reasonable to ask for the backup, and the fact it was given makes me think at least some people agree. I absolutely give people here the benefit of the doubt about their good intentions, but there is a context right now of national political figures working against science, often by repeating lies that might sound reasonable to some at first. I hope that helps clear up the question of sentiment. edit: clarity

macspoofing 6y ago

>I agree that the forests should be managed differently, but if this being "California's mismanagement" is an actual thing as opposed to political disinformation, I'd love to see a couple links to back it up. There are two narratives here. The Democrats want to blame Climate Change. Republicans want to blame California's mismanagement. Both are correct but there is no policy that any government could implement that will solve climate change in the next few decades. But you literally have Biden going around and blaming Trump for these fires when there is no climate policy that United States could have implemented in the last 2 decades that would have made any difference. On the other hand, regardless of climate change, California has implemented policies that created this problem and California can implement policies that will prevent future wildfires from spreading out of control. But California is a mess. Controlled burns are constantly challenged in court by activists and NIMBYs and bogged down by environmental regulations. California needs to perform controlled burns of around a million acres of land, but is doing something on the order a few thousand even with a backlog of 20 million acres[1]. Logging policy has clear-cut forest replaced with dense bush[2]. And bad vegetation management policy has been the mantra for decades in California. In this case, the Democrats are wrong and are engaging in outright lying in order to deflect blame. Climate change is an important issue, but climate change policy is not going to result in a solution for these wildfires. >Some quick googling suggests that it's mostly a Federal problem How? How is this a federal problem? [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-using-more-prescribed-burns-to-reduce-fire-risk/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-... [2] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-10-14/newsom-clear-cutting-rim-fire-california https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-10-14/newsom-clea...

jvanderbot 6y ago
Yes. Climate change should be met with mitigation (to avoid further climate change) and realistic adaptations of forest management. But, to make matters worse, the baseline expected rate of fires is higher due to climate change, and is much higher due to PG&E negligence. We can and should attack all factors with regulation, maintenance policy change, etc. The fact is, we had maintenance policies for PG&E's portion, and they were negligent.

bryan0 6y ago

Here are some articles explaining California's role in forest mismanagement.[0][1][2] I think what's interesting, and a real problem, is that all reasons about causes of the fires is seen as a political stance, when the factual causes of the fires should be not a political issue. All of these things are true. They're not political statements: 1. CA mismanaged its forests by not doing proper controlled burns 2. Climate change making conditions ripe for fires 3. PG&E was negligent in maintaining its infrastructure But people want to assign the blame to either #1 or (#2 and #3), and by doing that they are implicitly taking a political stance. It's not productive and makes finding robust solutions to these problems harder. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-using-more-prescribed-burns-to-reduce-fire-risk/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-... [1]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article239475468.html https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article239475468.html [2]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Top-scientist-knew-Big-Basin-was-at-risk-for-a-15514626.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Top-scientist-knew-Bi...

ComputerGuru 6y ago
What about all the federally owned land in California suffering from the same “mismanagement?” It’s also not clear to me that - regardless of the party in question - it is fair to call it mismanagement unless credentialed people had pointed out the risk of not allowing controlled burns and the government insisted on doing them anyway because of different priorities, aka mismanagement.
- zbrozek 6y ago
  It's not news. Fire management folks have been preaching controlled burns for decades. https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...
  - EricE 6y ago
    Whats even nuts is many types of trees only propagate with fire. Fires are required to open the cones and let the seeds out. They are actively killing the native forests by over zealous fire suppression and lack of controlled burns. Environmentalism in name only - sound and fury signifying nothing.

jaywalk 6y ago

It's more complex than that: https://reason.com/2020/09/14/western-wildfires-can-be-prevented-if-burdens-on-forest-management-are-eased/ https://reason.com/2020/09/14/western-wildfires-can-be-preve...