Since the year 2000, according to the California Air Resources Board, wildfires have destroyed over 19 million acres, mostly forest and chaparral, over 30,000 square miles. At the same time, these wildfires exposed millions of Californians to smoke so thick and toxic that people were advised to stay indoors for weeks. Utility companies, attempting to prevent fires from starting, cut power during hot and windy summer days to millions more Californians, sometimes for several days in a row. During one of the worst fire seasons in recent years, in the summer and fall of 2020, it is estimated that wildfire smoke released 127 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, more than California’s entire electricity, commercial, and residential sectors combined.

A recent study by University of California researchers revealed that in 2020, wildfires produced more than double the amount of greenhouse gas emissions than all the reductions made in California between 2003 and 2019, combined. In fact, emissions from wildfires were the second highest source – behind transportation but ahead of the industrial sector, and ahead of all power plants put together.

The conventional explanation for these catastrophic wildfires is that climate change has led to longer, hotter, drier summers in California, creating conditions where small fires can more easily turn into ‘megafires’. In response, California’s politicians and government agencies have enacted a series of measures designed to achieve “net-zero.”, such that all economic activity in the state will either generate zero CO2 emissions, or whatever emissions are generated will be offset by activities that sequester an equal quantity of CO2.

But current climate policy, and public debate, has an enormous, gaping hole. It fails to take into account that one of the biggest sources of California’s carbon emissions – not cars, not electricity generation, but ‘mega’ wildfires – results from outdated, ideologically-driven forest management practices.

This is an enormous missed opportunity to develop positive, practical policies to combat climate change in a way that brings people together around common sense solutions, moving beyond polarized and divisive ideological extremes.

There are modern ways to manage California’s forests that would restore them to health, prevent recurring ‘megarfires’, and introduce practices that guarantee California’s forests are not only carbon neutral, but substantially carbon negative.

[….]

A century ago, in the 1920s, tactics to suppress forest fires were still in their infancy. But techniques and technologies steadily improved, along with firefighting budgets. By the second half of the 20th century, an army of firefighters could cope effectively with California’s wildfires. For a while, a combination of timber harvesting and natural fires prevented excess fuel buildup in the forests. But regulatory restrictions on logging that started in the 1990s, and increasingly aggressive fire suppression, laid the foundation for the problems we see today. 

During the 1980s (in 2020 dollars), CalFire spent an average of $28 million per year ($66 million in inflation-adjusted 2020 dollars) on fire suppression, and the average annual timber harvest in the state was 6 billion board feet. In 2020, CalFire spent an astonishing $1.7 billion on fire suppression, nearly 10 times more than in the 1980s after adjusting for inflation, while the annual timber harvest had declined to just 1.5 billion board feet. 

These two trends are of course directly related. The ‘megafires’ of recent years are the result of excessive undergrowth, which not only creates fuel for fires that are vastly more difficult and costly to control, but competes with mature trees for the sunlight, water, and soil nutrients needed for healthy growth.

This is why California’s forests are not only tinderboxes but are also filled with dying trees. Now Californians confront nearly 20 million acres of overgrown forests.

In a speech before Congress in September 2021, Representative Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) summarized the series of policy mistakes that are destroying California’s forests. McClintock’s sprawling 4th congressional district covers 12,800 square miles, and encompasses most of the Northern Sierra Nevada mountain range. His constituency bears a disproportionate share of the consequences of forest policies emanating from Washington, D.C. and Sacramento.

“Excess timber comes out of the forest in only two ways,” McClintock said. “It is either carried out or it burns out. For most of the 20th Century, we carried it out. It’s called ‘logging.’ Every year, U.S. Forest Service foresters would mark off excess timber and then we auctioned it off to lumber companies who paid us to remove it, funding both local communities and the forest service. We auctioned grazing contracts on our grasslands. The result: healthy forests, fewer fires and a thriving economy. But…we began imposing environmental laws that have made the management of our lands all but impossible. Draconian restrictions on logging, grazing, prescribed burns and herbicide use on public lands have made modern land management endlessly time-consuming and ultimately cost-prohibitive. A single tree thinning plan typically takes four years and more than 800 pages of analysis. The costs of this process exceed the value of timber—turning land maintenance from a revenue-generating activity to a revenue-consuming one.”

When it comes to carrying out timber, California used to do a pretty good job. From the 1950s to the 1980s, as noted, the average timber harvest in California was around 6.0 billion board feet per year. The precipitous drop in harvest volume began in the 1990s. The industry started that decade taking out not quite 5 billion board feet. By 2000 the annual harvest had dropped to just over 2 billion board feet. Today, only about 1.5 billion board feet per year come out of California’s forests as harvested timber.

Wildlife biologists and forest ecologists who spend their lives studying and managing these timberlands now agree that tree density in California’s forests has increased thanks to “non-climatic factors such as the prohibition of controlled burning, and legacies of fire suppression.”

The increase is not subtle. Without controlled and naturally occurring fires that clear underbrush and small trees, and without responsible logging, forests become overgrown. According to a study conducted in 2020 by UC Davis and USDA, California’s mid-elevation Ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests used to average 60 trees per acre, but now average 170 trees per acre.

This is not an isolated finding. Observations of excessive tree density are corroborated by numerous studies, testimony, and journalistic investigations. Roughly tripling the density of trees across millions of acres of forest leaves them stressed and starved for soil nutrients, sunlight, and water.

California’s excessive forest density not only results in overgrown, dried out and fire prone trees and brush. It also impacts California’s water supply and aquatic ecosystems. 

That’s because excessive forest density also causes excessive evapotranspiration, the process by which plants emit water through tiny pores in their leaves. And in this case, what goes up does not come down. Water lost to evapotranspiration is water that does not percolate into the ground to recharge springs and feed streams. Scientists affiliated with the National Science Foundation’s Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory have concluded that “forest thinning could increase water flow from Sierra Nevada watersheds by as much as 10 percent.”

[….]

Enhancing Community Safety

There are three layers of protection against fires for people living in forests, more formally referred to as the urban-wildland interface. The first, forest thinning, needs to involve multiple agencies cooperating based on community needs and land topography, rather than stopping at arbitrary jurisdictional boundaries. The second layer of protection requires removing combustible material along access roads, ensuring safe evacuation routes. Roads need to be wide enough to allow cars to evacuate one way at the same time as oncoming firefighting vehicles pass in the other direction. Third, homes themselves need to be hardened against embers, with brush and other combustible materials cleared away from the structures. With these conditions met, insurance against fires can remain affordable, because the risk of fire harming people and property in the forests is minimized. All three of these goals can be achieved by reviving California’s timber industry.

Revive Sustainable Logging

Turning land maintenance from what it has become – a revenue consuming activity – back into a revenue generating activity, starts with bringing annual timber harvests up to a level that matches the natural rate of forest regeneration. To accomplish this, California’s logging industry would need to roughly quadruple in size. The good news is that with decades of accumulated experience, logging using today’s best practices can significantly improve forest ecosystems. In forests owned and managed by some of the logging companies and public utilities in California, for example, owl counts are higher than in California’s federally managed forests.

An important element is a technique known as “clear cutting.” This is where a logging company removes all the trees in a designated area, ideally not more than 40 acres. Because it is done on a 60- to 100-year cycle, ‘clear cuts’ can benefit forests. By converting one or two percent of the forest back into meadow each year, areas are opened up where it is easier for owls and other predators to hunt, helping to maintain naturally balanced ecosystems. In addition, during a clear cut, needles and branches are stripped off trees and left to rejuvenate the soil. Water  runoff is managed as well, through ‘contour tilling’ which creates furrows that follow the topography of  hillsides. Rain percolates into the furrows instead of running off causing erosion – and these furrows are where replacement trees are planted.

But clear-cutting can only sustainably be performed on one to two percent of the land in any given year. There are other types of large scale, sustainable logging that can be used in areas deemed more ecologically sensitive. Southern California Edison (SCE) owns 20,000 acres of forest around Shaver Lake in Southern California where they practice what is known as “total ecosystem management.”

California’s worst fire season of this century was the summer and fall of 2020, when 4.1 million acres – over 6,000 square miles – burned. The Creek Fire was the largest, burning over 550 square miles in Southern California. But the 30 square mile island of SCE-managed forest around Shaver Lake was unscathed. This is because for decades, SCE has been engaged in timber operations they define as “uneven age management, single-tree selection,” whereby trees to be harvested are individually designated in advance, in what remains a profitable logging enterprise. Controlled burns are also an essential part of SCE’s total ecosystem management, but these burns are only safe when the selected areas are already well-managed through logging and thinning.

[….]

Obstacles to Modern Forest Management in California

The last two decades in California have included fire seasons of terrifying scope and ferocity, with four of the most recent years delivering the most area burned: 1.3 million acres in 2017, 1.6 million acres in 2018, 4.1 million acres in 2020, and 2.4 million acres in 2021. But experts (and, sadly, politicians) saw this coming – and more to the point, knew what had to be done.

In 1999, the Associated Press reported that forestry experts had long agreed that “clearing undergrowth would save trees,” and that “years of aggressive firefighting have allowed brush to flourish that would have been cleared away by wildfires.” But very little was done. And now fires of unprecedented size are raging across the Western United States.

“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement with expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.

Year after year environmentalist organizations including the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity sued  to stop efforts to clear forests through timber harvesting, underbrush removal and controlled burns, in the misguided belief that these efforts would protect ecosystems. In fact they made them weaker and more vulnerable. As natural fires were suppressed and the forests became more and more overgrown, the excessive biomass competed for the same water, soil, and light that a healthier forest would have used, rendering all the trees and underbrush unhealthy. 

One specific manifestation of this was the rapid advance of the bark beetle, a mortal threat to California’s forests. In a healthy forest, with a more natural density of trees, each tree gets enough water to produce the sap that is part of its defense against threats like bark beetles. With more trees, there is less water to go round, each tree produces less sap, and therefore cannot repel the beetles – which end up killing the tree. As a result, visitors to California’s forests in the Sierra Nevada often see not only the blackened trees and hillsides devastated by ‘megafires’ – but vast areas of dead trees that are the victims of disease and infestation. In the decades when the ideology of fire suppression dominated policy-making, it wasn’t just excess biomass that accumulated, but dried out and dead biomass. And what happened among California’s tall stands of Redwood and Ponderosa Pine also happened in its extensive chaparral. 

Fire suppression, along with too many ideologically-driven bureaucratic barriers to controlled burns and undergrowth removal, turned the hillsides and canyons of Southern California into tinderboxes.

In 2009, after huge blazes wiped out homes and forced thousands to evacuate, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich observed: “The environmentalists have gone to the extreme to prevent controlled burns, and as a result we have this catastrophe today.”

In 2014, Republican members of Congress tried again to reduce the bureaucracy associated with “hazardous fuel projects” that thin out overgrown forests. The bill got nowhere thanks to environmental lobbyists who worried it would undermine the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the law that requires thorough impact assessments ahead of government decisions affecting public lands. And despite almost universal awareness that more thinning is the only way California’s forests will ever recover their health and resiliency, extreme environmentalists continue to throw up obstacles.

In June 2022, a group that calls itself the John Muir Project, joined by a small number of other state and local like-minded organizations, sued the U.S. Forest Service. The transgression? A proposal to thin 13,000 acres of forest near Big Bear Lake, in the heart of California’s San Bernardino Mountains.

We must overcome these barriers. The next section of this report will examine specific policy solutions that would save California’s forests, reduce carbon emissions, and create economic, social and environmental opportunity.

Structural reform that takes away the ability of anyone, anywhere to file lawsuits will be a critical element, because even when consensus is reached with reasonable environmentalists, it only takes one group or individual to file a blocking lawsuit to cripple progress. …..