Tomorrow
California Can’t Wait for a Green New Deal Slashing carbon won’t help for decades. It’s time to adapt.
The fires won’t be controlled anytime soon
what can be done? On the eve of Labor Day weekend, three of the four largest fires in state history were still burning, a Bay Area ring of fire, with none of them close to “contained.” That Friday night, the Creek Fire broke out in Fresno County and quickly grew past 100,000 acres in two days. The state’s offshore winds, long understood as the driver of the most devastating and out-of-control fire disasters, had not yet even arrived. When they did, they ignited something like a whole new fire season compressed into just a few days. The Bear Fire, in Northern California, burned through 250,000 acres in a single day—roughly as much as burned in the entire state throughout all of 2019. In Oroville and the surrounding foothills, 20,000 people were ordered, immediately, to flee. In photographs of the nearby Bidwell Bar Bridge, normally green, the sky and flames and bridge were all blurry variations of the same shade of burning rust. You could mistake it for the Golden Gate Bridge.
Up the coast, in Oregon, five separate towns, the governor said, had been “substantially destroyed,” with smoke carried forward by near-hurricane-strength winds. In the Cascade foothills, five separate fires had burned over 100,000 acres each. Half a million people, one-tenth of the state’s population, were in some stage of evacuation, many of them piling into Portland—experiencing, at the time, the worst air quality anywhere in the world.
In San Francisco, Wednesday at noon, you couldn’t see anything. “No measurable sunlight” was penetrating the canopy of smoke and reaching the ground—the fire equivalent of an eclipse. Rooftop solar stopped working. It was 30 degrees colder than the forecast had called for. A friend’s toddler walked out the front door with a flashlight, searching for the sidewalk. With smoke plumes rising 50,000 feet, you couldn’t even fly above the fires, only through them.
On social media, in a mood of tragic acquiescence, people were posting real-time photos of Bay Area burnt orange alongside stills of Blade Runner 2049 and debating how much science fiction had already gotten right. Among climate activists, the mood was exhaustion and urgency—fury that so little had been made of climate change in coverage of the summer’s historic heat wave, which ended in these flames, and conviction that the fires made the case for climate action, again, as if the world needed another reason to move faster.
We must, of course. But in planning a path forward, through fire, California cannot wait for a Green New Deal or electrified everything. For one thing, it would take too long—the climate impacts of even the most aggressive global decarbonization, scientists believe, won’t be observable for decades. Until then, all else being equal, warming will worsen, and the fires of the American West will too. By 2050, the earliest we can hope to see the benefits of fast climate action, the area burned annually in the West is expected to have doubled, perhaps quadrupled.
That isn’t to say nothing can be done. It can. As fire scientists have been arguing now for decades, a century of bad forest management—suppressing all fires—has proved a catastrophic failure, producing an unmanageable amount of what scientists call “fuel” and the rest of us call “dead trees.” In the mouths of climate skeptics, or Donald Trump, blaming forest management can sound like an evasion: It’s climate change, after all, that has quintupled the amount of flammable forest and extended the wildfire season by two months. And it’s no coincidence that three of the four biggest fires in California history are burning in the immediate aftermath of a historic heat wave, during which Death Valley registered what may have been the highest temperature ever recorded on planet Earth: 129.9 degrees.
But one reason “forest management” sounds like an evasion is because it also sounds doable—small, manageable, a matter of “clearing brush” from your backyard. In fact, the need for what’s called “controlled burning” to thin the state’s deadwood is so large it would dwarf anything humans have ever seen. In January, a team of scientists offered an authoritative estimate of how much of California would have to be burned under human supervision to stabilize its fire ecology: 20 million acres. That’s approximately one-fifth of the state—an area roughly the size of Maine. But the state is falling far, far short. “Between 1982 and 1998,” writes Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica, “California agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year”—about one-600th of the needed 20 million acres. “Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres.” A new proposal by Governor Gavin Newsom calls for burning fewer than 100,000 acres; a more ambitious proposal, from state and local officials, aims for only 1 million acres.
“California is built to burn,” the fire historian Stephen Pyne once told me. “It is built to burn explosively.” Indeed, many thousands of years ago, millions of acres burned there each year. But while there is wisdom in the Indigenous approach to controlled burning that governed the region for centuries, the population of the
By 2050, the area burned annually in the American West is expected to have doubled, perhaps even quadrupled.
state before the arrival of Europeans may have numbered less than 200,000. Today, it is 40 million, almost all of them people living in communities defined by sprawl into what is referred to, not just by scientists but even by locals, as the “wildlandurban interface.” If you are rooting for a return to a truly “natural” fire regime in the state, you are rooting against almost everything we know of as life in California today.
This is why, beyond the immediate threat of their flames and the eerie contagion of their smoke, the California fires offer a threefold prophecy of our climate future. First, however much we do to stabilize the world’s climate, it will not stop the burning anytime soon. Second, it isn’t that the land itself can’t survive climate change but that the conditions of habitability on which we have erected our sprawling, often unjust civilizations are being profoundly shaken, even in places with comparatively little warming. And third, we have ahead of us the hard work not only of rapid decarbonization but of adapting to the new world already made inevitable by warming—particularly for the communities, disadvantaged and marginalized, that always stand most clearly in the path of climate impacts like wildfire.
Take housing. Since 1990, more than 60 percent of new residential development in California has been in wildfire-prone areas—housing for those who can’t afford to live in Greater L.A. and the Bay Area. Today, more than 1 million buildings in the state are vulnerable to wildfires. These building patterns must stop, and perhaps even reverse, if the next generations of Americans are to feel truly safe in their homes. In parts of the West, there has been some movement—stricter safety regulations, for instance, on new homes in dangerous areas. But in California, where the threats are bleakest and the housing market is most pinched, the state’s modest housing-reform bill, SB50, has failed multiple times simply because it requires a paltry increase in housing density. A politics of genuine climate protection—not to mention climate-based relocation—would prove far more disruptive.
What is required, climate economist Gernot Wagner says, is “a radical rethinking of how and where we live.” And if our politics is moving too slowly, in California and elsewhere, warming isn’t slowing down to match it. Indeed, as the unprecedented burn rate of the Bear Fire shows, precisely the opposite is happening. “For many, it’s time to retreat,” climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer tweeted on Thursday, reflecting on the fires. “What would the cost be? What’s the cost of not retreating?” ■