[CyLith]

I think that is only a partly correct way to think about it. I live up in the Sierra foothills in a very rural area, and based on what I see, I think the effects of wildfires are indeed negating climate policy. Allow me to explain.

For people who have never lived in an area that is both rural and wildfire prone, pile burning to eliminate yard waste is an activity that is entirely foreign. You see, out here, most people believe that the primary method of eliminating yard waste is by burning it in a pile. I happen to live in town where there is trash pickup service available, but I opt to simply take stuff to the dump myself. Most people don't want to pay or don't have such service available. Burning yard waste is almost always extremely polluting. One burn pile full of leaves and pine needles can often smoke out my entire town. Fortunately, pile burning is only allowed on certain days (when the weather is such that wildfire risk is reduced). That is not to say that pile burning is always so bad; it has to be done properly. If the pile is hot enough, there is little smoke. But most people do not burn them hot enough with enough long-burning materials (i.e. wood).

So why did I bring this up, since a wildfire is just this on a massive scale? Well, I do not personally believe that properly managed fuel management would result in as much smoke and particulate pollution, for two reasons. One, indigenous peoples here used to regularly set fire to the forest to manage the fuel load. This was done regularly enough that there simply wasn't as much material to burn, and done when weather was cooperative (e.g. before rains). A modern wildfire can burn with such ferocity that most trees end up burning, instead of just the undergrowth. This represents a much greater release of long-captured CO2. And second, there is now a culture of placing responsibility on individual residents to maintain "defensible space", asking them to perform pile burning regularly. As I mentioned above, this results in what feels like disproportionately dense particulate pollution, with annoying regularity throughout the cooler times of year.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

As far as CO2 is concerned, wouldn’t burning “yard waste” be neutral year over year? If you’re only burning this year’s growth, you can’t release any more carbon than the plants took in to grow in the first place. The wildfires might not be neutral because our forests are overgrown, but if they happened more frequently and only burned a years worth of undergrowth, they would be

[CyLith]

As far as CO2 alone is concerned, that is true. The issue is that if you burn a fire cleanly, you (ideally) produce only CO2. If you burn the fire poorly, you produce less CO2 per se, and a _lot_ more particulates, which is bad for air quality. On burn days, the sky is noticeably smoggier all throughout the mountains, and the sunsets are tinted red. I imagine this would have the effect of trapping in daytime heat similarly to how cloudy nights after sunny days are warmer. And since pile burning generally happens during the day, we get an amplified greenhouse effect up here.