No the root of the problem is that there's too much forest that hasn't burned. Blaming PG&E is missing the actual problem.
For instance the Beirut explosion was the fault from the welders causing the explosion. Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place? California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue. These forests should be periodically burned the remove rather than letting them accumulate into such a large blazing fire.
> California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue.
The majority (57%) of forest land in California is managed by the federal government even before considering the part managed by tribal governments, which are also out of state control though subject to federal oversight. Only 3% is directly under state control.
47.7% of the total land in California is federally owned (not uncommon in the West, where most federal land is; outside of 12 Western states, the Federal government owns only 4% of the land in the rest of the country.)
Western land management problems are, generally, problems of federal administration, not state government.
EDIT: But, it's important to note I am not saying the fires involving PG&E equipment are a federal problem rather than a PG&E problem. While the current federal administration and their cheerleaders likes to blame forest management and seems blind to the fact that, if true, that would be a federal issue, PG&E’s deliberate, knowing cutting of maintenance corners, curtailing inspections and cutting inspector training, knowingly leaving specific faulty equipment in place years after it was identified as faulty and dangerous, and covering up that it did all those things, are well documented. While they accepted a plea bargain to 84 counts of manslaughter, the facts documented in the investigation would seem to more than support conviction of 2nd degree murder (of the “abandoned and malignant heart” type), based on other cases where that has been applied in CA based on willful disregard of safety factors.
Yeah, lots of issues came together for the perfect storm.
Personally, I do think that PG&E should have seen a harsher punishment. If some pyro had went in and started the same fire, they'd have been in jail for life. PG&E does this shit and they got a slap on the wrist.
But, your point is very valid. This place was a tinderbox. They were one lightning strike, on cigarette butt, one illegal bonfire away from going up in flames spectacularly.
The federal government has blame for not maintaining land.
Beyond that, they have blame for not aggressively addressing climate change (which has contributed to the level of dryness).
All of this points to a common societal issue. Rather than spend money to fix things, we wait until everything blows up before asking questions.
This shit scares me. How much more of our world is teetering on the edge of catastrophe?
I think one of the key points in that Twitter thread is that the distributed responsibility disincentives anyone from pushing to tackle difficult problems (because no professional or personal liability is involved) and the centralization of profits ensures that the dysfunctional administrative structure stays in place.
You get much larger fires when they go undetected for significant periods of time. Lightning strikes can happen anywhere, but most ignition sources are close enough to people for early responses. Power lines are therefore unusually bad as they regularly start fires in forests a significant distance from people making both detection and response more difficult.
If power companies what to run lines through these areas they need to take responsibility for what’s going to happen.
> 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?
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.
> 1. CA mismanaged its forests by not doing proper controlled burns
The vast.majority of the first within the State are not subject to state management; 3% of the forest land is controlled by the state or administrative subdivisions. 57% of forest land in the state (and 47.7% of total land area of the state) is directly controlled by the federal government and some of the rest by federally-but-not-state supervised tribal governments. In between there is some private land which the state has less control over than the state-owned land but more than the federally-controlled land from which it is excluded from management. So even if there was mismanagement by the state, there's very limited potential impact.
> 2. Climate change making conditions ripe for fires
This is true.
> 3. PG&E was negligent in maintaining its infrastructure
This understates the case; PG&E was between grossly reckless and actively malicious in maintaining it's infrastructure.
I’ll grant your final comment on #3 but on the others I disagree.
If CA was requesting that the federal govt do controlled burns to better protect their citizens from wildfires, and the fed govt refused, then you would have a point, but from the research I’ve done (and I cited 3 random examples above) that’s not what happened. In fact it’s the opposite where organizations which controlled the land desperately wanted to perform prescribed burns, but were prevented from doing so because of local regulations.
As far as #1 being a political judgment: That you think #1 is false and 2 and 3 are true, one can guess how you feel about a host of other political issues, most have which have absolutely nothing to do with forest management.
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.
Read the articles I posted. you can call it what you want, but "credentialed people" have been desperately calling for prescribed burns for years only to run up against local regulations. specifically: "local air boards around the state, and a lack of consistency can create problems for burn projects"
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.
Humans have known to regulate forest fuels for 1000's of years. This modern stubbornness is hubris based on ignorance of the real technology that has been developed, over tens of thousands of years, in forest management.
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.
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.
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 :).
There are quite likely many other towers with the same vulnerability, the same potential breakage. Those will cause other fires when they break. There are multiple reasons why they should address those very old towers that haven't had maintenance, because they'll cause other fires.
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.
> but the law is what determines culpability, not the cofactor analysis of the actual problem root.
We are talking about what ought to be, not what is. The law falls under the category of is, and does not imply ought. I think everyone in the conversation understands that PG&E bears some amount of legal liability for these fires.
I think we should talk about how to design systems such that preventable deaths happen less often (supposing the costs to prevent them are appropriately scaled). I think hitting PG&E with arbitrarily large fines in this situation will not ultimately have much beneficial effect on the rate of preventable deaths. I think that their negligence happened to be the spark, but if not something else would have caused it. Like a tree falling on a line, a lightning strike, or a gender reveal party. Even if the fine led to perfect compliance on their part (it wouldn't/won't), that would not substantially reduce the rate of preventable deaths. This is because their negligence is not the central cause that most significantly raises the probability of large fires.
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.
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 ...
>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
The vast majority of forest land in California is owned by the federal government and is National Forest land. California can't just go and run controlled burns in those federally controlled forests. That would need to be done in cooperation or under the direction of the US Forest Service and should be funded by the US Forest Service since they own the land.
If the federal government wants better forest management in the National Forests, they should increase funding for forest management and hire more employees into the US Forest Service.
You can certainly blame California for allowing people to build homes at the wildland urban interface and for not requiring homeowners to take better fire defensibility measures. The forests are a more complicated issue and the feds take much of the blame.
If the feds were the problem, why aren't other states such as Texas or Colorado which have similar geographical features to California experiencing the same perpetual fire seasons over and over?
Sure - you can have that discussion. What the Democrats are doing is blaming climate change and Trump's climate change policy. Surely you agree that that is just dishonest.
The only solution to the wildfire problem offered by Trump is that California should do a better job raking up leaves/pine needles and should remove more dead fuel from forests. I think that is much more intellectually dishonest, especially given that Trump is in control of the US Forest Service, which is the agency that would be in charge of raking the leaves and removing the dead trees...
If Trump drastically increases the budget to the USFS and starts a new and improved forest management program, I will gladly applaud the effort. Sadly, I doubt that will happen.
I see Trump as largely out of the discussion; for instance during the Carr Fire he said they needed more water (besides the stupidity of using water, Carr Powerhouse is a major transfer point for the California water system).
Newsom relies on blaming PG&E and Global Warming; he seems to be the political version of the Deep Pockets Theory.
Neither politician offers help for people whose homes are in imminent danger.
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.
>the baseline expected rate of fires is higher due to climate change,
Yes. But we can't control the climate. Or rather climate change will require policies spanning decades or centuries.
>and is much higher due to PG&E negligence
Sure. PG&E should be held accountable for their part. But to mark them as a cause is not right. California was a tinderbox waiting for a spark to start the explosion. It could have been anything, and in fact, there were many 'sparks' that started a bunch of these fires. You make PG&E the scapegoat, you're going to miss the true culprit - bad vegetation management.
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?
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?”
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.
In general, the study contends that the fires are fuel-dominated (too much forest) and not wind-dominated fires. It also contends that the California drought climate has contributed significantly to the problem.
> On the timber-rich interior US Forest Service (USFS) forests of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, anomalously large fuel loading due to a century of successful fire suppression and timber harvesting practices has been a dominant factor
The problem is likely too much forest at these level of droughts, so forest management bears some responsibility. Economically speaking though if PG&E has been given such a lucrative business opportunity as a sanctioned monopoly, they ought to be held responsible as well.
Also, the part that is not clear to me and I would appreciate if someone has an answer - speaking cynically, if PG&E as a private company causes damage and tax payers pay, and if PG&E as a state run company causes damage and tax payers pay, why do I care who runs it? Is it just that the prevailing politics in California is that corporate=bad and civic=good?
Under this approach, we would have to burn all of our natural forests down to the ground because of climate change. It will soon be too dry for any forest to be in it’s natural state. Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem, federal funds are required to manage federal lands. Especially since the current federal administration is fueling the onset of climate change like no other. I’ve witnessed the billions spent by PG&E in trimming trees away from these poles, but they should have spent a little more and gone the distance to just bury these lines underground. PG&E is a failed experiment. They have shown when confronted with the challenge of what’s best for the public and what’s best for the shareholders, they always choose the latter
That's not how natural dynamic systems work. There is a level of stability (some optimal level of forest) that the natural system wants to have, and it will naturally burn away excess if the people were not present. Much of the fires this year were caused by lightening (nature).
> Plus I don’t see how this is strictly a California problem
Indeed it is not just a California problem. Believe it or not, there are other places in the country that do more controlled burns and manage fires better. The US Southeast burns nearly 2x the acreage as California on an annual basis.
> The US Southeast burns nearly 2x the acreage as California on an annual basis.
The US Southeast has a land area of 580,000mi², California is 163,000mi². So, just to be even as a proportion of land area, the former would need to burn 3.5 times the acreage of the latter on an annual basis. Unless your claim is that California’s problem is that its controlled burns are too extensive, I'm not sure what your point is.
Not sure what point you're making, but my point is there are individual smaller states in the US that do more prescribed burns by acreage than California. To name a few, Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina [1]
> my point is there are individual smaller states in the US that do more prescribed burns by acreage than California
Then you should have said that.
And, to the extent you believe that's a problem, you should probably address the entity that controls most forest land in California (and directly owns and excludes from state control almost half of the total land of the state.) Their executive HQ can be contacted at:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Yeah, I know President Trump likes to say the problem is California not “raking forests”, and his cult-like followers just echo his propaganda with some light editing of wording and interjection of random tangential factoids to give it a veneer of rationality, but the bottom line is that, like most of the West and unlike the US outside of the West, California land management, and even moreso California forest management, is predominantly a federal issue, from which the state is excluded from much of due to the Supremacy Clause.
The natural systems are out of wack, my point is that the way the earth is heating up, we would eventually need to burn every forest to compensate for the growing temperatures. This stance is ridiculous. I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have such ravaging fires, and lightning happened all the time. Better yet, scientists can look at past patterns and they too have proved that climate change is real. Ask a firefighter who’s been around for more then 30 years, they will tell you. The belief that Trump is even remotely correct on this issue is to believe complete foolishness. Alas, here we are.
Forest management is in conflict with home ownership and building code in the forests, and it's sufficiently complicated that what's happening is the only way forward. What support is there to say private land ownership within forests: federal, state, and BLM land? If there were no private land ownership, there'd be no political resistance to controlled burns, there'd be no demand to put out fires immediately. The instant humans started to build in these areas, their rights directly lead to the changes in natural state of the forests.
There are similar problems with homes on beaches and in flood plains. Not only is private home ownership allowed, it's federally subsidized via the National Flood Insurance program.
I don't feel like your analogy makes sense here. The fact that there were explosives stored in the Beirut Port for years is exactly the same kind of institutional failure as PG&E failing to maintain their equipment for decades.
It's true that there are natural factors at play here, but in the case of Beirut, that might be more akin to asking "why is there such a large market for ammonium nitrate?"
My take on this is that PG&E way/is behaving negligently and the investigation that resulted from the fire uncovered that. They are literally the cause of the fire in the sense that their actions are what produced the initial flame.
However, I don't think the fault should lie with them because something was going to start a fire and they just happened to be the unlucky bunch stuck holding the match. There is no way you could say "if it wasn't for their negligence there wouldn't have been a fire."
> There is no way you could say "if it wasn't for their negligence there wouldn't have been a fire."
This thread is going in circles. What people are saying is that PG&E should be expected to do what's required of them to maintain their equipment, and that failing to maintain their equipment was a cause of this specific fire. You're right, it's basically bad luck that their decades of negligence led to this disaster, but it still did lead to it. Whether or not there was a pre-existing condition that made fires more likely.
Because the majority of fault lies at California/Federal government whoever is in charge of clearing the forests regularly not PG&E.
Again going back to the Beirut Explosion analogy -- yes the welders could have taken better precautions. Perhaps someone could have maintained the explosives better too. Maybe we could even hire firefighters on standby and install alarms next to the port.
But none of this removes the large pile of explosives that shouldn't be placed there.
If PG&E is maintaining power transmissions lines that are surrounded by a known gigantic reservior of combustible material then they are still responsible for when their equipment ignites that material.
That doesn't remove the onus on land management to engage in best forestry practices, but PG&E still has a significant burden of responsibility.
That is part of it, the other part is the homes of paradise did not take 'best practices' into account for their homes. (or town, that one narrow road out seems like a deadly bottleneck) There were many news articles at the time talking about how homeowners couldn't prune back the woods far enough from their house, couldn't use less flammable materials in their home construction, etc.
The only way to get developers and builders to build more resiliently is more strong regulation. As it stands, developers have zero incentive to cut into their profit to build a fire resistant structure since they immediately sell it and it doesn’t matter what happens after that, at least to them. In fact, If they are a follower of the perverted philosophy of the past couple decades, if have shareholders it would be their duty to maximize profits by not spending extra.
A wildfire that regularly clears out only the underbush is what was the place historically (and the ecosystems have adapted to this), human prevention of these fires plus climate change has led to fires consuming way more material than they should.
> Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place?
Ah, so the problem is negligence. And what negligence was there? PG&E not maintaining their towers as clearly documented (or rather, not documented as the thread shows), or even possibly the federal government not maintaining Bureau of Land Management and USDA Forest lands? No - it's California's fault, spoken as if even a healthy forest wouldn't burst into flames if someone threw molten hot aluminum on a kindling pile.
But where could that idea possibly have come from? Perhaps the Federal govermnent, whose head has basically been parroting that exact line? What an astounding coincidence.
For instance the Beirut explosion was the fault from the welders causing the explosion. Yes, but the larger and more important issue is why are there so many explosives in the first place? California's mismanagement with it's forest is the same issue. These forests should be periodically burned the remove rather than letting them accumulate into such a large blazing fire.