[Mick]

Back to the original OT topic, I thought this was a good piece by Pro-Publica, generally a fairly left wing platform, but in this case echoing a lot of what GR has stated:

https://www.propublica.org/article/they-...ody-listen

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres...We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

BC

Pro Publica is not left wing. It is one of the most fact-driven sources of journalism there is. They do deep dive reporting for those with attention spans greater than a tweet. You totally undermine its credibility by insinuating it has an agenda beyond reporting truth. Look at the awards it has won as an indicator of the quality of reporting it does.

Lefties always say that... ;)

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Anyway, after reading the Pro Publica story on fire in CA...

Who is actually in charge of making the decisions about forest management? The Governor? Legislature? Counties? Forest service? It would not be surprising that somewhere along the line the “fire fighting industrial complex” is greasing elected representatives somehow to continue a boondoggle at tax payer expense.

My question, not addressed in the article to my knowledge, is what is the public opinion on controlled burning in CA as means to reduce major fire risk? I mean is there a public agreement that for every acre that burns under control on purpose, we can ultimately save whatever it is, 10 acres from being burned later? Or maybe it’s for every dollar spent on controlled burns, we save $10 in out of control fire suppression? Is the public aware of these trade offs? Given the amount of tax payer dollars that get spent on fire fighting in the state, you’d think the public would be quite tuned in to this issue and make it a priority for state government to follow the science to make wiser decisions.

Per www.mediabiasfactcheck.com , Pro Publica has a left/center bias and the quality of its content is rated "High".

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/propublica/

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Well most of California forest are Federal forest.  So there's that.

57% of California's 33 million acres of forest are controlled by the federal government. So get off your butt, Mr. President and stop those fires.

[Mick]

Back to the original OT topic, I thought this was a good piece by Pro-Publica, generally a fairly left wing platform, but in this case echoing a lot of what GR has stated:

https://www.propublica.org/article/they-...ody-listen

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres...We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

BC

Pro Publica is not left wing. It is one of the most fact-driven sources of journalism there is. They do deep dive reporting for those with attention spans greater than a tweet. You totally undermine its credibility by insinuating it has an agenda beyond reporting truth. Look at the awards it has won as an indicator of the quality of reporting it does.

Lefties always say that... ;)

---

Anyway, after reading the Pro Publica story on fire in CA...

Who is actually in charge of making the decisions about forest management? The Governor? Legislature? Counties? Forest service? It would not be surprising that somewhere along the line the “fire fighting industrial complex” is greasing elected representatives somehow to continue a boondoggle at tax payer expense.

My question, not addressed in the article to my knowledge, is what is the public opinion on controlled burning in CA as means to reduce major fire risk? I mean is there a public agreement that for every acre that burns under control on purpose, we can ultimately save whatever it is, 10 acres from being burned later? Or maybe it’s for every dollar spent on controlled burns, we save $10 in out of control fire suppression? Is the public aware of these trade offs? Given the amount of tax payer dollars that get spent on fire fighting in the state, you’d think the public would be quite tuned in to this issue and make it a priority for state government to follow the science to make wiser decisions.

Per www.mediabiasfactcheck.com , Pro Publica has a left/center bias and the quality of its content is rated "High".

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/propublica/

---

Well most of California forest are Federal forest.  So there's that.

57% of California's 33 million acres of forest are controlled by the federal government. So get off your butt, Mr. President and stop those fires.