What if the answer to California's wildfire woes is more fire?

This article supports my contention that clearing dead wood and brush to save homes and protect against wild fires is wrong.  Nonetheless this is likely to be our response.




In a review of scientific studies on forest carbon management, two professors at Oregon State University, Beverly Law and Mark Harmon, made the case that cutting small trees to reduce carbon emissions from wildfires simply doesn’t work because you end up having to remove more wood than those fires would burn — leaving fewer trees to store carbon.

Even if you embrace Hanson’s position that a hands-off approach is best, utilities and municipal workers in California continue cutting down trees to protect themselves from fire. Homeowners are supposed to clear a “defensible space” 100 feet from their houses. All that work is generating tons of woody biomass. I asked Kathryn Phillips, who leads the lobbying efforts for Sierra Club California, if she thought it made sense to burn that wood to generate energy.

Though Phillips’ organization is officially neutral on the point, her response was that people shouldn’t be burning wood at all. The best option is to leave the wood in the forest. The rest might be chipped up or used for furniture and building materials. If people need to clear fuels off their land, “they need to figure out options to do something with that wood,” she said. “And if those options don’t exist they need to complain to the state. Burning it in a biomass plant isn’t the answer.”



https://grist.org/article/why-california-is-fighting-fire-with-fire/