re: 60 minutes: remember when Trump criticized “forest management” during California’s fires ?

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3% of the forestland

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California

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TBoy

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Retard Alert

The actual percentage of forest is over 40% state. Typical of govt this is a myriad of rules and regulations regarding forestry management, but the fed govt and the supreme court have ceded a lot of the management to the state regarding environmental issues like harvesting and controlled burns.

A few things lead to the problem. First, I believe there are around 9 million dead trees, ravaged by some beetle, that are great tinder for a fire and still there.

Second, Cali being Cali, while they swoon about the environment, the "haves" have moved further and further into pristine areas. They have no problem chopping down trees for their homes, but they want to keep the narrow country roads, which make it impossible to get fire equipment in during emergencies.

And lastly and foremost, the power companies are quasi public/private companies given that their rates must be approved, as such they are sooooo woke, their website looks like an NGO with all the woke nonsense.

Which means they cut corners on spending to ensure they are spending enough on the nonsense, and what spending is traditionally the first to go, proper equipment management. And whats left is to prioritize number of customers per dollar spent. In other words if I have so much money to check transformers, Ill make certain the populated areas are taken care of first and the rural last. Which is what they are currently being sued for, faulty transformers in rural areas.

So the state does control far more than is alluded to. And I would venture to say, the people on the fed side are no doubt just as woke, they didnt joih the forestry dept to cut down trees so they are happy to go along to get along.

As usual Trump was right, and as usual, you are paying for Cali's poor management.

Democrats don't actually care if the forests burn up. They just use them for ideas that further their evil cause.

I recall him specifically talking about deadfall removal and the libs all laughed over martinis at him. Then the next wildfire hit and all of the experts were saying that they should have managed deadfall exactly how the Orange Man described.

There was a TED talk a while back by a forestry management expert that essentially proved that human intervention has lead to lusher, thicker, and more dangerous forests. He used photos from the early 1900s of California forests to show the differences from today. Natural forests were more sparse and therefore had many more natural firebreaks than today. I can't recall all the details, but it was a very good explanation of this and the many other issues with the way they manage these forests.

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California owns only 3% of the forestland in the state. 3%

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Gavin Newsom has a parrot.

California is responsible for fire suppression on private and state-owned land, as well as certain local areas. Those comprise 43% of California's forests. The state established extremely restrictive regulations dealing with fire-protection under the ironical auspices of minimizing "harm to the environment." They restrict activities on everything from thinning, to brush clearance, to controlled burns. By contrast, 2/3rds of Federal land in CA is considered well managed, 1/3rd (19% of CA's total woodlands) is suboptimal for fire-protection (though still generally better than California).

The forest management argument has been ongoing for decades. The accumulation of undergrowth has, and always will be, the main factor for the spreading and prolonging of these fires.

interestingly enough, Esquire had an article on this a few weeks ago, actually praising trump on his stance.

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Trump Wasn’t Wrong That We Need to Take Better Care of Our Forests

Donald Trump said he’d been talking to the president of Finland, and he’d heard something about raking. “He called it a forest nation,” Trump recounted, “and they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.” He was expounding on a previous point while touring the wreckage left behind by California’s catastrophic Paradise fire in 2018: “We’ve got to take care of the floors, you know, the floors of the forest.”

This was dismissed as fundamentally unserious across wide swathes of the political media, and not just for the inartful phrasing. Trump seemed desperate for a fire fix that did not involve coming to grips with the climate crisis. But taken in the most generous possible terms, he had a point. While wildfires have grown bigger and more destructive in the United States and across the world due to hotter and drier conditions linked to the changing climate, we do have some work to do when it comes to what’s called “forest management.” One piece of that concerns managing the vegetation that fuels fires at ground level—in Trump’s parlance, “the floor.” Though a far bigger factor is that we’ve simply been fighting fires wrong for most of a century.

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LINK

Its a perfect storm of many factors.

These forests were replanted with much denser, fast growing douglas fir than what would have existed naturally to maximize timber yields in the early-mid 20th century. 75ish years of fire suppression and these stands are literally powder kegs.

As a poster above showed, the native vegetation would have been much more patchy and open. You would also have more species diversity with more fire resistant hardwood species mixed in.

Nowadays the timber industry is effectively dead up there when sustainable thinning of those dense stands is desperately needed.

Controlled burns are also difficult there because all the rich silicon valley fricks have built their vacation homes in fire zones where if a controlled burn gets out of hand agencies will get their pants sued off.

Finally, California is hotter and drier than it has been historically. You can debate why that is, but tree cores of thousand year old redwoods show how different the climate was in that area compared to today.