Wildfires and Progressive Climate-Change Deniers

CO2 emissions from fires overwhelm the cuts from regulation

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"No doubt drought and a warm start to the summer have contributed, but the bigger culprit is poor forest management that has let fuel accumulate over decades."

"even if U.S. banks stopped financing fossil-fuel projects today, global CO2 emissions would rise for decades owing to growing coal production in India and China. Another inconvenient truth is that government policies to reduce CO2 emissions will be swamped by wildfire emissions.  

University of California researchers last year calculated that wildfire emissions in 2020 were two times higher than the state’s greenhouse gas reductions from 2003 to 2019. California wildfires in 2020 were the state’s second largest source of CO2 emissions after transportation and generated double the greenhouse gases of all the state’s power plants.

Another study this spring in the journal Science estimated that burning boreal forests in North America and Eurasia in 2021 released 1.76 billion tons of CO2, nearly twice as much as global aviation that year. That’s also more than four times New York State’s annual emissions and about three times as much as the Inflation Reduction Act’s projected reductions in 2030.

Government land management policies that prevent wildfires from spreading out of control, such as prescribed burns, would reduce CO2 emissions more than offshore wind or electric-vehicle mandates."