We've all heard of controlled burns, but they've obviously not been used effectively in California. It's estimated that around 4M acres burned annually in CA be

We've all heard of controlled burns, but they've obviously not been used effectively in California. It's estimated that around 4M acres burned annually in CA before modern firefighting, so unless you're proposing controlled burns on the order of millions of acres I don't see how that makes it sensible to deploy this particular technology in any widespread way. Given how calfire abuses the tools they do have (e.g. aggressively stopping wildfires that pose minimal threat to human settlements), I wouldn't trust them not to abuse this one as well. But how much does it even really matter? Far more fires are started by humans than lightning.