California has the nation’s second-highest electricity prices, due to costly regulations designed to prevent climate change. But it will likely be worse at fighting climate change this year than Florida, which has lower electricity prices than the national average. That’s because California fails to prevent huge wildfires that result in enormous amounts of pollution and emissions of greenhouse gases. As NPR reported in 2021, “the South is decades ahead” of California in wildfire prevention.
As Claire Lehmann observes about the wildfires currently ravaging the Los Angeles region, “insured losses from these fires will exceed $20 billion, setting a new record for wildfire-related insurance claims in US history. The total economic loss could reach $57 billion. A UCLA study found that California’s wildfire emissions in 2020 were twice the total greenhouse-gas reductions the state achieved from 2003 to 2019. Decades of Californian climate change advocacy has, quite literally, gone up in smoke.” This year’s wildfires will likely be even more devastating, and have resulted in far more people being left homeless.
In the southeast, unlike California, states do a sufficient amount of controlled burns to get rid of flammable material, and keep wildfires from raging out of control. As NPR explained in 2021, in
the Southeastern U.S….prescribed fire is widespread thanks to policies put in place decades ago. From 1998 to 2018, 70% of all controlled burning in the country was in the Southeast….For thousands of years, forests and woodlands experienced regular burning, both sparked by lightning and used by Native American tribes, which prevented the buildup of flammable growth. Without [such fires], the landscape is prone to intense, potentially devastating wildfires….
By the 1960s, land managers realized that many landscapes had become choked with brush, grasses and small trees. In the Southeast, where the majority of land is privately owned…residents had continued controlled burning [to get rid of flammable brush]…..
Florida has done prescribed burns on more than 1.6 million acres so far this year. California has only burned around 35,000 acres. The state is 2.5 times larger than Florida….
Experts estimate that tens of millions of acres [in California] need addressing statewide, but lack of funding, personnel and political will has limited the work on public lands….[California] landowners have had little support from public agencies to conduct burns on their property. Permits from firefighting agencies and air quality regulators can be cumbersome to secure…
“California is, in some ways, in the dark ages with prescribed fire,” [Director of Fire Research Morgan] Varner says.
