Nanobots? Freezing severed heads?
Lots of brooms?
Relatively sane suggestion, actually, by his standards - just clear cut half of California’s trees. Simple as that.
Apparently, this is ‘cheap’, too, and has no drawbacks.
Yup. :dubious:
Gotcha covered. For 2020, I’m considering opening up the windows to a one-week spread (Sunday to Saturday).
I’ll post updated rules later. I’m upgrading the prize too–adding in New Mexico Green Chile!
Tripler
I bought new Cheetos–ate the old one at the end of Round #1.
Cheap as in it is self funding. Because you sell the wood.
Obviously removing forest has drawbacks. No fucking shit.
It seems that whatever humans do, most of that forest isn’t going to be around much longer, as desertification seems to be the outcome…
So cutting it down or splitting it into burn sectors is probably better than the present policy.
That helps this year. What about next year when there aren’t all the trees but you still need to pay people to maintain the firebreaks, and it’s not much cheaper to do that?
Which is the problem in the first place. The current policy, properly implemented, reduces fire risk. The problem, as you are clearly unaware, is that PG&E, among others, went the cheaper route of not doing enough to reduce those risks.
And if we’re being honest, it’s not cheap at all. Process that much wood is non-negligible. Warehousing alone would be a logistical nightmare. Not all of it, or even much of it, would be useful as lumber, meaning much of it would have to be pulped and we wouldn’t recover much money anyway.
Seriously, how little thought did you put into this idiocy?
If your response includes “just do <blank>”, you are a moron and should consider that maybe the experts have considered better options.
Sell it as vintage 2019 California firewood.
Next year’s vintage will be a much smaller crop and worth far more.
Obviously more than you. Moron. Obviously the current policy doesn’t reduce risks or there wouldn’t be 20 wildfires at the same time.
“Properly” is right there in the bolded portion, dipshit.
Are you being serious?
PG&E has rightly been accused of shorting funding for maintenance of their infrastructure, i.e. nothing to do with policy and everything to do with implementation.
As noted in the other thread, dry brush and grasslands are as much a problem, anyway. Cutting down half the trees wouldn’t help much anyway, unless utility companies do the maintenance they’re already NOT doing. And would create new problems on top of that.
Your solution is to say “Welp, instead of actually doing what we were supposed to, let’s try something different that won’t work but paint flames on the side to make it go FASTER!”
You are a misinformed idiot. Also while you can reasonably try to make the case that converting forest to desert or grasslands is worse in terms of other negatives than constant fires, if there’s not a mountain of fuel it’s a lot easier to contain. It absolutely would be effective to log out thick firebreaks. Whether or not this would be overall the best idea I can’t say. But the present policy is “let the dead wood pile up year after year, making the resultant fire ever worse, and prevent all ignition sources”.
This doesn’t fucking work. Obviously. If you live in California you can probably just step outside and see the evidence.
Congratulations, Sammy. You’ve thought about this problem as long as Trump did. And evidently with the same amount of research. Maybe try doing a little more, and this time use a source other than your ass.
Indeed so.
If the policy was actually to allow dead trees to pile up, you might have a point.
The actual policy is to clear brush and trim trees. And indeed, the better run electrical utilities in the state (definitely not PG&E) have been doing this and have fewer fire issues.
The problem (for the umpteenth time) is PG&E hasn’t been doing that. Instead, they’ve been diverting those funds to boost (apparent) profits and executive pay packages.
But apparently, the solution isn’t to actually implement existing policy rather than ignoring it. It’s to send in an army of loggers and forest sweepers. I’m sure PG&E would love diverting the logging and sweeping funds to bonus packages as well.
From SamuelA’s Guide to Economics:
“Use natural leaves from trees as an international form of currency. The natural, stochastic variation in shapes and veins makes counterfeiting impossible. If inflation becomes a problem, burn down all of the forests.”
If PG&E is as corrupt as you say, cool. I accept that. My point was that a spark from a power line is like the last snowflake that starts an avalanche. And now PG&E is legally allowed to shut off the fucking power, indirectly killing people every time they do it, so they don’t get blamed for being the last snowflake.
That’s fucking stupid and an obviously faulty theory of liability. If an area of forest is 1 spark from a wildfire, it’s going to happen eventually. And if the winds are just right and no firefighting equipment is right there it apparently does 30 billion in damage.
But it’s fantasy - like something an eco hippy high on ganja would think - to not realize that is a spark from a power line caused a massive fire that killed dozens of people and did billions in damage, obviously something else would have cause the same thing a very short time later.
A truck blowing a tire, embers from a backyard grill, something.
And, actually, if luck prevented any other fire sources for several years, that would be several more years of flammable materials, making the inevitable fire even worse.
Not how courts for liability work, apparently, but I guess those are run by morons. Or something.
Honestly I have no idea why PG&E is planning to settle. Maybe it’s like you say - they could argue this theory but the plaintiffs attorneys are gonna show the cocaine bills or whatever for PG&E execs and the charred bodies of the victims and an email from those execs redirecting funds away from maintenance. Some smoking guns.
So, basically, “I’ve have no knowledge of the situation and have done no basic checking of news, much less research, but I’m going to spout off like I have a fucking clue”.
Got it. Yeah, your opinion is duly fucking noted.
Yeah, sure.
Key paragraph :
** One fundamental cause is that public agencies and officials succumbed to pressure by environmental groups who pushed for fire-management policies that take a reactive posture (fire suppression), rather than a proactive stance (fire prevention and active management). Although the hope was to preserve land in its “natural state,” this approach set the stage for horrific wildfires by allowing excessive growth of fuels.**
Another one:
**Stanford University environmental economist Terry Anderson notes that scientific forest management techniques to reduce dangerous fuel loads, including logging, prescribed burns, and thinning, are “continuously thwarted by environmental activists who want to let nature take her course.
**
Kinda sounds like what I was saying…
What are you saying? Yeah. You come in here, thinking you can safely call me misinformed, and shit yourself.
The Independent Institute that you’re quoting is a right wing think tank that denies climate change, wants to privatize Medicare and the military, criticizes civil rights advocates, argues to reduce the size of government, and so on. In other words, it’s an ultra-conservative (strongly libertarian) policy group. They’re not a reliable source for claiming that environmental activists are to blame for the California wildfire issues.
Did you know that before choosing them as a source?
Happy to explain. It is because they, unlike you, have information on, and expertise in, the underlying situation. They hire people who not merely come up with some theoretical worldview regarding forest fires, but actually understand all the aspects related to the causes of these fires. Then they have experts who determine what, given those facts, the likely outcome of a court case would be, and what that would cost. I would wager that at no time they consider executives’ cocaine bills, for that matter and as an aside.