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The next frontier should be preventing forest fires. This is just Canada, imagine if we could prevent them around the world. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-

The next frontier should be preventing forest fires. This is just Canada, imagine if we could prevent them around the world. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-emissions-from-massive-canadian-fires/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-... >Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon

vkou 2mo ago
Forests burn and grow back. Healthy forests (not poorly-managed monoculture) are carbon-neutral on human timescales.
- sleepyguy 2mo ago
  Forests need to be managed, the problem is Canada has very little private property and vasts amounts of Crown land that is not managed. These forests just gather fuel and then burn down every summer. They need to be managed or this is only going to get worse.
volkl48 2mo ago
We tried "preventing forest fires" for about a century, and it's a large part of why they're burning so intensely and destructively now. Forest fires are a natural part of the life cycle of many forested regions - particularly in Canada and the Western US. Suppressing all fires as soon as possible means that dead, dry plant matter continues to build up for decades longer than it naturally would, creating a "tinderbox" effect where eventually you have vastly more intense and destructive forest fires than would typically have occurred if you'd just left nature alone in the first place. And because these fires have so much more concentrated fuel they also burn hotter and can make the recovery of the forest in the area take far longer to come back. The correct answer is to regularly perform controlled burns in areas near human settlement and to mostly leave things alone in areas away from it. Much of Canada's land area is literally uninhabited and dozens if not hundreds of miles from the nearest road, much less actual settlement. -------- Additionally: Strongly discourage new construction in the Wildland-Urban Interface (aka: low density settlement in a wooded setting, your typical picture-esque rural mountain home - that wood is meant to burn one day, taking your cute house with it). Beyond that, strict building codes for whatever does get built there + ordinances for maintaining the space around the home to reduce risk. Although to a significant extent, property insurers are basically already taking on this role in recent years. I have family out in the hills in CO, their insurance rates are multiple times that of their property taxes and they are now quite strict on evaluating properties in terms of risk-mitigation. And failure to adhere to all of what they want to see means you're getting dropped by the insurer and you will have a very hard time getting a different company to pick you up. ------ Anyway, as another poster noted: The forest grows back and recaptures all that carbon in a few decades, making those fires basically carbon-neutral.
- jabl 2mo ago
  I suppose, hypothetically, you could gather up the excess fuel in the forests and burn it in a power plant. Probably impractical at scale though..
  - volkl48 2mo ago
    Tough economics to imagine attempting to effectively gather mulch from in between the trees when we're talking areas so remote they often aren't even harvested for actual lumber and are a huge distance from the nearest power plant (or grid connection of any significant capacity). ------- However, this isn't addressing the other problem: Fire is an actual part of the ecosystem in those areas. Various plant/tree species are adapted around it. Some require fire for their seeds to germinate, others need the cleared ground that results (and their seeds can survive the fire), others rely on it to keep other species out with adaptations that make them much less likely to burn in a moderate intensity/natural fire (and so they survive while an invading species doesn't). Fire also opens up areas and causes natural forest succession - which creates an environment for more than just the biggest trees to exist for a few decades. Etc, etc, etc. You simply can't have the natural environment out there exist as it is evolved to function without fire in the long-term.

vkou 2mo ago

Forests burn and grow back. Healthy forests (not poorly-managed monoculture) are carbon-neutral on human timescales.

sleepyguy 2mo ago
Forests need to be managed, the problem is Canada has very little private property and vasts amounts of Crown land that is not managed. These forests just gather fuel and then burn down every summer. They need to be managed or this is only going to get worse.

volkl48 2mo ago

We tried "preventing forest fires" for about a century, and it's a large part of why they're burning so intensely and destructively now. Forest fires are a natural part of the life cycle of many forested regions - particularly in Canada and the Western US. Suppressing all fires as soon as possible means that dead, dry plant matter continues to build up for decades longer than it naturally would, creating a "tinderbox" effect where eventually you have vastly more intense and destructive forest fires than would typically have occurred if you'd just left nature alone in the first place. And because these fires have so much more concentrated fuel they also burn hotter and can make the recovery of the forest in the area take far longer to come back. The correct answer is to regularly perform controlled burns in areas near human settlement and to mostly leave things alone in areas away from it. Much of Canada's land area is literally uninhabited and dozens if not hundreds of miles from the nearest road, much less actual settlement. -------- Additionally: Strongly discourage new construction in the Wildland-Urban Interface (aka: low density settlement in a wooded setting, your typical picture-esque rural mountain home - that wood is meant to burn one day, taking your cute house with it). Beyond that, strict building codes for whatever does get built there + ordinances for maintaining the space around the home to reduce risk. Although to a significant extent, property insurers are basically already taking on this role in recent years. I have family out in the hills in CO, their insurance rates are multiple times that of their property taxes and they are now quite strict on evaluating properties in terms of risk-mitigation. And failure to adhere to all of what they want to see means you're getting dropped by the insurer and you will have a very hard time getting a different company to pick you up. ------ Anyway, as another poster noted: The forest grows back and recaptures all that carbon in a few decades, making those fires basically carbon-neutral.

jabl 2mo ago
I suppose, hypothetically, you could gather up the excess fuel in the forests and burn it in a power plant. Probably impractical at scale though..
- volkl48 2mo ago
  Tough economics to imagine attempting to effectively gather mulch from in between the trees when we're talking areas so remote they often aren't even harvested for actual lumber and are a huge distance from the nearest power plant (or grid connection of any significant capacity). ------- However, this isn't addressing the other problem: Fire is an actual part of the ecosystem in those areas. Various plant/tree species are adapted around it. Some require fire for their seeds to germinate, others need the cleared ground that results (and their seeds can survive the fire), others rely on it to keep other species out with adaptations that make them much less likely to burn in a moderate intensity/natural fire (and so they survive while an invading species doesn't). Fire also opens up areas and causes natural forest succession - which creates an environment for more than just the biggest trees to exist for a few decades. Etc, etc, etc. You simply can't have the natural environment out there exist as it is evolved to function without fire in the long-term.