The past few years have seen increasing intensity of wildfires in California. To anyone who has been paying attention, this has been predicted for decades by climate scientists. I remember hearing about desertification and forest death when I was still in grade school. Climate deniers have started blaming poor forest management, and it seems like a lot of of people are blaming PG&E. It’s neither.
The problem isn’t poor forest management. In this decade, an estimated 129 million trees have died in the state of California alone (source). The massive effort it would take to purge California forests of their dead trees is prohibitively expensive and would require a mobilization of manpower and resources that is completely unrealistic. Besides, what would we do with all those dead trees? The loss of that biomass would impoverish the soil of nutrients, leading to more tree death and more wildfires. Why are trees dying? Drought and Bark Beetle infestation are the major factors, and both are results of human-caused climate cancer (ibid). The problem isn’t PG&E’s equipment. A spark might start the fire, but the extent and devastation of these fires is due to the amount of fuel and the fast rates of burn and spread. Those are the result of dry, dying, and dead forests. PG&E’s equipment is out of date and dangerous, true, but in healthier forests the resulting fires would be contained more easily or might not catch in the first place. If PG&E were to magically fix all of their equipment tomorrow, we would still have a tinderbox problem waiting around for a spark. The problem is climate cancer. And it’s only going to get worse.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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