Neuropathée Chalamet

Here is the simple talk version of what’s wrong with California’s fire situation. My background: My startup plants trees. We want to accelerate global reforestation because it’s the simplest and most immediately scalable solution for closing the gap on climate change. It also has a lot of other benefits like making the land healthier and more beautiful. Learning a lot about trees means I also had to study forest fires and how to prevent/manage them. If you are a fire/land management expert, I apologize for the details I will elide and concepts I will simplify. Help me educate the public and our leaders with simple models. People say “wildfires are happening because of climate change!” and the climate deniers then say, “No, it’s happening because of bad forest management!” and then the conversation stops being useful. Let's set that argument aside. It’s hot and dry and very windy, and that means if a fire starts in a place where there’s a lot of fuel, it will become a raging wildfire. Yes, we can argue about whether it’s due to climate change, but we also have an immediate problem with wildfire and the weather is hot and dry and very windy. We have to solve that: the problem where our houses are burning down. You can think of it as a chain with many links, each one is a necessary cause. One link is the hot and dry weather. Another link is the fuel supply. Another could be climate change as a proximate upstream cause. But for us to prevent wildfires we just need to break ONE LINK. Here is the key: We must remove the fuel supply. It is our only solution at this point. This is why: Fire is a natural part of the ecosystem. As a part of the natural ecosystem, you need to have regular low-grade fires that burn dry material and even, in some cases, help certain plant species seed and grow. A lot of people understand this at small scale - on Sunday you and Grandpa go up and burn 10 acres on the back 40. However, many past decades of fire policy that focused on over-suppression has led to a buildup of dry fuel. In recent decades, we’ve learned about the need for prescribed burns, of the natural role of fire, and our fire management people try their best to do those burns. But they simply cannot burn enough of the fuel backlog. There are many reasons for this, and if you want to get blame-y about it, an uninformed public, spineless politicians, and bad structural incentives are all at fault. But that misses the point. Until recent times, the weather wasn’t quite as dry and hot, so this fuel backlog was, if not great, still not disastrous. But now the weather is - for whatever reason - hotter, drier, and the winds are blowing hard. And now the margin of error is smaller, and that fuel backlog HAS TO BURN. How much fuel backlog? Here’s where the numbers matter. To restabilize our natural ecology in terms of fire, there is so much built-up fuel that roughly 20 MILLION ACRES in California of land with pent-up dry fuel need to burn. Each year, our fire and forest management people are able to burn 20,000 acres. The most ambitious and optimistic of those guys estimates that maybe in five years we might be able to increase that to 40,000 acres of prescribed burns. WE ARE OFF BY THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. We need to get rid of this fuel backlog. And we can’t do it by burning it. And by the way, we’re not going to solve it by solving climate change. I’m working on that with Terraformation, and along with everyone else who is working on it, it will take (best case) decades, and what we will get is (again, best case) getting back to a world that’s cooler and wetter where the fuel backlog still exists, it just doesn’t go up in flames as often. WE NEED TO MECHANICALLY REMOVE ALL OF THAT FUEL BACKLOG. This is a mega-project and we need to do it. We need to cut, thin, rake, scoop up, replant, and otherwise remove 20 million acres of dry material and get rid of it without burning it. (One solution is to burn it in sealed pyrolytic ovens that turn it into biochar without release the CO2) The scope of this is enormous (and unthinkable in our recent political Overton Window). But I say the time has come again for giant mega-projects. It costs roughly $2000-5000 to clear an acre, depending on terrain specifics. This means $100B in total - if I were running the plan, I would try to do it over a 5-year period, focusing on strategic points first upwind of cities, so it would be $20B/year for 5 years. If we don’t do it - by the way, our margin of safety goes DOWN every year it gets hotter and drier - it will burn and burn and burn again and we will pay for it in far worse ways. It is time that we get back to a mindset of “the natural world is dangerous and can kill us” and our solution to that has to be “let’s mobilize all our resources and ingenuity to solve it in a big way.” In this case, the state of the “natural world” is kind of our fault, so all the more reason to solve it. But it will not get done by half-measures (or 0.1%-measures, to be technical). This is landscape-scale restoration of land we (and our predecessors!) have mismanaged! We can get to work and solve it, or we will suffer more. sources: https://t.co/Q3frzfxNlu

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