They Seem Like Nice Ladies..But: The Logic of Producing Essential Things Elsewhere (For the Environment?)

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TEHRAN – Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh has issued an order, paving the way for women with high capabilities to boost presence in the oil industry

..this is what is wrong with the conservation movement. It has a clear conscience….To the conservation movement, it is only production that causes environmental degradation; the consumption that supports the production is rarely acknowledged to be at fault. The ideal of the run-of-the-mill conservationist is to impose restraints upon production without limiting consumption or burdening the consciences of consumers.
— Wendell Berry

This is a great gig.  You can use mega-amounts of fossil fuels in your products (like, say the Outdoor Recreation industry) and pretend you have the moral high ground if you are against production in our country.  You can make zillions of bucks of people offshoring manufacturing of your products- and then critique “greedy” producers of the material you use.  I still don’t get “domestic oil and gas hate”.. who’s behind it, and what it’s really about.  There seems to be a steady stream of “they are bad” articles coming out, especially from sources allied with a certain political party.  So yes, there seems to be some kind of organized campaign against these folks.  But just the domestic ones (seems equally true in Britain).  So a person has to wonder what the end game of this is really about.

I don’t want to be accused of listening to Fox News (the horror!) but I had read somewhere about the idea that Russia had been funding some ENGOs in Europe with the idea of making them more reliant on Russian sources of energy.  And Fox News had a story so here it is.

So I said to myself “how could I ever figure out the truth here? Did they or didn’t they?”  And then I had a revelation… it doesn’t matter who funds groups if their goals are the same. Keep it in the ground (here) is fundamentally the same as extract it (there).  Who wins? other countries of Questionable Human Rights and Environmental Records. Who loses? Our workers and communities.   Or is it just that if the environmental and human rights impacts occur elsewhere, we can ignore them more readily? I hope that is not the case.

On thing we learned from Covid is that some things are more essential than others. So let’s take a look at where the fundamentals of our economy (fossil fuels) are currently coming from.

In the every-handy EIA information, we can find a list of countries we import oil from. This Politico story from March talked about outreach to Venezuela, the Saudis and Iran (see the nice ladies in the photo above), due to the desire to stop Russian imports. As the story says,

“The U.S. has long had complicated and tense relationships with all three countries, which in recent years have been accused of everything from election fraud to human rights atrocities.”

Given all that, and the fact that imported oil has arguably a larger environmental impact, why wouldn’t we want to produce as much domestically as possible and import the rest from the most agreeable and socially and environmentally responsible countries? It seems logical to me.  We don’t seem to try to offshore other industries due to their impacts on the environment.. in fact, there is a Buy America push by the Biden Administration. So what did the oil and gas workers do to get left out?

For a long time, some groups have been pushing the Biden Admin to stop oil and gas leasing on federal lands.  In fact, he felt the need to commit to that during the campaign, despite the fact that many argue that it is illegal.  As part of that campaign, this  USGS study, often mischaracterized (even by an E&E News headline in Scientific American; I expect better from them) as “Fossil Fuel Extraction on Public Lands Produces One Quarter of U.S. Emissions” played a large role, so much so that it is frequently used in news stories as if it were a fact that everyone understands.

Whereas the study actually studies emissions not just from extraction but from use, see page 3 under introduction.

Emissions are produced through two processes: (1) the combustion of fuel for electricity generation, mechanical work, heating, or use as a feedstock and (2) the fugitive emission of gases during the processes of extracting and moving fuel.

Which we can imagine would have more or less the same effect (or possibly greater?) to the atmosphere from other countries, depending on the various attributes of the resource,  extraction technologies and regulations, and transportation to the US.  Because if it’s about carbon emissions, the atmosphere there is the same one as here.

One of the first symbolic actions in the new Administration was to stop the Keystone Pipeline from Canada (from whom we import oil and uranium).  It’s almost as if part of that symbolism was pledge of fealty to party investors by dissing a partner vital to our own energy security.

And what technologies exist to reduce climate change? Those requiring uranium (also imported) and other rare earths, often found on federal land in the US.  For example

Uranium originating in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Uzbekistan accounted for 47% of total uranium purchased by U.S. COOs in 2020. Canadian-origin uranium and Australian-originan uranium together accounted for 34% (Table 3).

Many of these minerals occur on western federal lands, potentially running into obstacles in the efforts to “conserve” them.   That means that it’s OK to encourage thousands of tourists to come to a new “protected” area, but not OK to mine, or have drill rigs. Personally, drill rigs don’t bother me when I recreate. Crowds are much worse in my opinion.  Unleashed dogs chasing wildlife and all that- seem to bother say, deer or antelope, more than drill rigs (which tend to stay in the same place over time), from what I’ve observed.

It seems to me that there are certain projects like the Keystone Pipeline, Bears Ears, and the idea of stopping oil and gas leasing on federal lands (I think mostly onshore, but who knows?)  that from my environmental perspective, have mostly symbolic value.  So.. who determined that these specific issues were so important?  And what does that portend for domestic production of necessary post-fossil fuel material? Is “protecting our landscapes” more important than national security, and whose interests does that calculation serve? Because I don’t remember being asked.

Next Post: Are (Domestic) Oil and Gas Folks Really That Bad?

Opponents of conservation invoke NEPA

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Image: Scout Environmental

I have made several comments recently about situations that should not trigger NEPA procedures because they do not have adverse effects on the physical environment.  I became interested in this topic in 1986 when I noticed that development interests were arguing that forest plans adversely affected “community stability” (a euphemism for social and economic impacts), and this was being addressed as an “environmental” impact in NEPA documents.  Given that the goal of NEPA was better environmental protection, I could see how inferring that social and economic impacts of protecting the environment must be addressed through a NEPA process could lead to less environmental protection.

As an example of that actually happening, let’s talk about the proposal to conserve 30% of the nation’s lands (America the Beautiful/30 x 30).

Property rights advocate Margaret Byfield’s strategy for defeating the Biden administration’s aggressive conservation pledge comes with a twist: She wants landowners to embrace the nation’s bedrock environmental law.

Byfield, the executive director of American Stewards of Liberty — and daughter of the late E. Wayne Hage, an icon of the Sagebrush Rebellion II movement — sees the National Environmental Policy Act as a cudgel in her campaign to upend the “America the Beautiful” program.

But Byfield emphasized Friday that the strategy must also embrace NEPA, arguing the Biden administration has skirted its responsibility to execute “a programmatic” environmental review of its “America the Beautiful” plan.

“This is the environmentalists’ great law that they use as a weapon against productive agriculture and actually any kind of project,” Byfield said. “They use it to slow down and stop projects, they use it as a weapon.”

Byfield asserted that the Biden administration has skirted NEPA by moving forward without an environmental review.

“They also know if they do NEPA right, it’s going to take them three, maybe six, maybe nine, maybe 10 years to complete the study the way they make us do it. So why aren’t they living under the same laws they force us to follow?” she asked.

The obvious reason is that NEPA was not passed by Congress to protect “agriculture and actually any kind of project.”  The ASL seeks to turn NEPA on its head.  The interesting thing is that the Center for Biological Diversity did not mention this, instead stating that the President and executive orders are exempt from NEPA, and actually inferred that the future site-specific conservation actions could require NEPA procedures.

The law regarding application of NEPA to non-environmental consequences of environmental protection measures is less clear than it should be.  The Supreme Court framed this question in Metropolitan Edison Co. v. People Against Nuclear Energy in 1983

But we think the context of the statute shows that Congress was talking about the physical environment — the world around us, so to speak. NEPA was designed to promote human welfare by alerting governmental actors to the effect of their proposed actions on the physical environment.

But, here’s a confusing discussion by the Ninth Circuit in the 2000 case of Kootenai Tribe of Idaho v. Veneman, which challenged the procedures used to adopt the Forest Service’s Roadless Area Conservation Act (the “Roadless Rule”).  (Other plaintiffs in this case were Boise Cascade Corporation, motorized recreation groups, livestock companies, and two Idaho counties.)  The Forest Service did not appeal the district court’s injunction of the Roadless Rule, but an appeal was filed by environmental intervenors, who argued that the Rule did not alter the natural physical environment and require an EIS under NEPA.

Under NEPA, a federal agency is required to prepare an EIS for all “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.” 42 U.S.C. § 4332(2)(C) (emphasis added). “Human environment,” in turn, is defined in NEPA’s implementing regulations as “the natural and physical environment and the relationship of people with that environment.” 40 C.F.R. § 1508.14. See also Wetlands, 222 F.3d at 1105. The dispositive issue here is whether the Roadless Rule sufficiently affected the quality of the human environment to trigger the procedural requirements of NEPA.

We have explained that NEPA procedures do not apply to federal actions that maintain the environmental status quo. See Burbank Anti-Noise Group v. Goldschmidt, 623 F.2d 115, 116-17 (9th Cir.1981) (NEPA does not apply when an agency financed the purchase of an airport already built); Nat’l Wildlife Fed’n v. Espy, 45 F.3d 1337, 1343-1344 (9th Cir. 1995) (NEPA does not apply when agency transferred title to wetlands already used for grazing); Bicycle Trails Council of Marin v. Babbitt, 82 F.3d 1445, 1446 (9th Cir.1996) (closure of bicycle trails does not trigger EIS). In other words, “an EIS is not required in order to leave nature alone.” Douglas County, 48 F.3d at 1505 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). The touchstone of the EIS requirement is whether the change in the status quo is “effected by humans.” Id. at 1506.

Because human intervention, in the form of forest management, has been part of the fabric of our national forests for so long, we conclude that, in the context of this unusual case, the reduction in human intervention that would result from the Roadless Rule actually does alter the environmental status quo.

This perverse rationale (for this “unusual” case) has no citations, and I think it is only justified by a desire to decide the case on the merits of the EIS (which it upheld) rather than on a procedural question.  Moreover, it ignores the additional requirement that the environmental status quo must be adversely affected (the term “adverse” is used many times in the CEQ NEPA regulations).  Here is a 2012 paper on “beneficial effects” under NEPA.  Its conclusion echoes my concern from 35 years ago (which has become a reality).

Third, the policies underlying NEPA are in tension with a Beneficial Impact EIS requirement. Such a requirement would produce unnecessary cost and delay for environmentally beneficial projects and create perverse incentives for federal agencies without any compensating informational benefits.

Agencies that are using NEPA to justify delaying environmental protection are probably not violating the words of NEPA, but clearly violate its spirit.  Moreover, anti-environmental plaintiffs should not be able use the courts to facilitate this violation.

Permanentizing Roadless? House Bill 279

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I’m working on getting a subscription to Bloomberg Law for TSW so all I could get was this snippet.

Permanent roadless area protection is vital to preserving drinking water supplies, cutting wildfire risk, and saving Alaska’s oldest forests, Democrats said during a House Natural Resources subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.

Debate centered on a bill (H.R. 279) that would codify an existing US Forest Service rule prohibiting road building across swaths of national forests nationwide—Democrats’ backlash to a Trump administration decision to lift roadless protections in Alaska. That decisions allowed logging or development across 9.3 million acres of southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

Perhaps someone could post the rest of the story?  I happen to have spent a great deal of time working on Roadless  here in Colorado, and my experience tells me that the relationship between cutting wildfire risk and roadless is fairly complex.    In fact, that’s why after years of laborious work and public involvement, the Colorado Rule deals specifically with hazardous fuel treatments (because, yes, roadless areas can be close to communities and occur in wildfire-prone areas).  From the Key Elements summary of the final Rule allowed temp roads and specified that hazardous fuel treatments were allowed (otherwise you had to argue about uncharacteristic-ness):

Community Wildfire Protection
• Provides for hazardous fuel treatment by allowing tree cutting and temporary road construction in a defined area of ½ mile from the boundary of an at-risk community, called a community protection zone (CPZ) in the final Rule.
• If specific ground conditions are met, and a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) is in place, that boundary may be extended to 1 ½ miles, but temporary roads are prohibited in this additional mile.

Now the Colorado Roadless Rule was signed under the administrations of Governor Hickenlooper (of Colorado, currently Senator) and President Obama.  So it’s interesting that current House Dems would say that codifying the 2001 Rule is vital to “cutting wildfire risk.”  It may sound plausible but it’s not actually true.

Yes, perhaps the bill is performative virtue-signalling to certain groups and will never get anywhere, but I think it’s important to query the ideas behind it and the marketing thereof.

 

USFS: 2.87 billion BF in 2021

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From an article in Timber Harvesting magazine….

U.S. Forest Service reported it sold 2.87 billion BF of timber sales (compared to the agency target of 4 billion BF) in fiscal 2021, a decrease from 3.2 billion BF in FY 2020, according to the agency’s Fiscal Year 2023 Budget Justification document. The sold volume was valued at $197 million.

The decrease in sales was primarily due to limited staff capacity and no-bid sales, according to the agency, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic limited the mobility of timber crews, and field work continued to be difficult to accomplish due to the large fire activity across the Western U.S. Many employees that usually work to prepare timber sales were assigned to wildfire suppression and support. Recovery efforts after large fires, including stabilization work and hazard tree removal, necessitated the involvement of the staff who would typically work on preparing and administering timber sales, the agency stated.

Bipartisan Bunch of Senators and Representatives Weigh in on Wildland Firefighter Series and Pay

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Quoting Wildfire Today:

A letter signed by a bipartisan group of 28 lawmakers urged that steps be taken to avert critical staffing shortages in the wildland firefighting workforce. The document was sent May 10 to the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Secretaries of the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior.

Here’s an excerpt from the letter.

I particularly liked..”arbitrary policies (OPM) are driving recruitment and retention problems.”

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) must use its authority to stop further attrition in the wildland firefighting workforce. OPM has the authority for special pay rates to address staffing problems caused by significantly higher non-Federal pay rates, the remoteness of the area or location involved, the undesirability of the working conditions or nature of the work involved, and any other circumstances OPM considers appropriate. All these criteria appear applicable in this case.

We recognize that OPM, in collaboration with USFS and the Department of Interior (DOI), is in the process of establishing a new “wildland firefighter” occupational series as required under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This job series is an important step towards a sustainable livelihood and career path for federal wildland firefighters, with other steps to include housing support, modified scheduling, and leave policies that reflect the unique nature of wildland firefighting. A new job series that maintains the status quo could lead to a surge in resignations just as fire season begins, and OPM must be clear about how it will use special authorities in the near term to address any shortcoming in the new wildland firefighter occupational series.

Given OPM’s function as “the chief human resources agency and personnel policy manager for the Federal Government,” we wish to underscore some of the factors driving attrition in the wildland firefighting workforce, and their long-term implications. Pay is the most important issue, as it is in many professions and sectors of the economy. However, OPM policies and the challenges of being a wildland firefighter compound financial stress in unique and damaging ways. For example, federal wildland firefighters are paid by the hour, even when they are at an incident and miles from the nearest population center and effectively working. Many state and local firefighters are paid on a “portal-to-portal” basis, meaning 24 hours a day, from the time they are assigned to a wildland fire until the time they return, and are reimbursed on that basis by the federal government. Insisting on scheduling and paying federal wildland firefighters in the same manner as other federal employees, rather than other wildland firefighters, is one way in which arbitrary policies are driving recruitment and retention problems.

As President Biden said last year, “the only thing that really matters is if there’s enough firefighters.” The land management agencies have lost thousands of wildland firefighters in just the last few years. The federal wildland firefighting workforce is entering a pivotal stretch with the end of OPM’s classification review process and the beginning of fire season. The Administration must stop attrition and commit to rebuilding the ranks of our firefighting service.

This starts with increases in pay and benefits. The situation is urgent, and we stand ready to work with you to ensure our federal wildland firefighters are fully supported and compensated.

America’s Outdoor Recreation Act of 2022: Summary by Kyle Dunphey

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Lineup to get into Arches -Salt Lake City Tribune photo

Super article by Kyle Dunphey of the Deseret News. A bipartisan bill (cosponsors Manchin and Barasso) from an easterner and a westerner.  The story has links to the bill summary, who’s for and who’s “agin”, and the below summary of ten key takeaways from the 155-page bill.

So National Parks count as “protected” areas under 30 x 30. But NPS employees and the National Parks Conservation Association are worried about too many people causing environmental degradation.  The logical thing is to think.. maybe they shouldn’t count at some point, then, or some places within a larger park shouldn’t count as “protected”.  Perhaps Parks should become certified to a “protected from humans certification” like the recreation equivalent of FSC or SFI before they can count toward “protection” goals, with third party verification?  Anyway, here’s the story.

 

More parking

“Lot Full” signs are in high demand at Arches National Park, where increasing visitation has resulted in frequent park closures and popular trailheads overflowing with tourists.

One of the provisions in the bill is to increase parking, mainly for land managed by the Forest Service and Department of the Interior.

But due to a deferred maintenance backlog, which refers to projects that have been postponed due to budget constraints, the bill allows agencies to partner with the private sector “and lease non-federal land for parking opportunities.”

Parking is a hot debate, at least for National Park advocates, who worry that more parking will lead to more visitors that could result in more environmental degradation, search and rescue calls, wildfire risk and traffic.

“We could totally build a five-story parking garage but do you want to add that many people to the trail? What would that do to the experience while you’re hiking if you’re shoulder to shoulder and you’re waiting hours to get a picture under the arch,” ranger Melissa Hulls, visitor and resource protection supervisor at Arches, told the Deseret News in September.

Target shooting

The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management will be required to maintain at least one designated shooting range for each district under the bill. The ranges will not require a fee.

The bill piggybacks on former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s wish to see more shooting ranges in national monuments. But some environmental groups warn that more target shooting could lead to increased wildfire risk and vandalism.

‘Long distance’ biking

Under the bill, federal land management agencies — specifically the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Forest Service — need to identify at least 10 long distance bike trails, defined as a system with at least 80 miles on federal land.

Agencies will also need to identify 10 additional areas for trail development. For existing trails, the agencies need to “publish and distribute maps, install signage, and issue promotional materials.”

Broadband infrastructure

In a push to expand internet access on public land and rural communities, the BLM and Forest Service would be directed to identify “high priority” recreation sites that lack broadband.

The agencies would then estimate the cost to develop broadband infrastructure, and if necessary, partner with the Rural Utilities Service under the Department of Agriculture.

The National Parks and Conservation Association, however, says the provision raises concerns, and agencies need to first understand “the extensive use of and impacts to natural and cultural resources to build and maintain broadband at recreation sites within the National Park system.”

Defining ‘peak season’

Moab locals can confirm — the busy season is growing, inching into traditionally slow parts of the year.

In an effort to “better understand visitor trends” the Department of the Interior would be directed to examine the impact seasonal closures have on local tax revenue, while looking for opportunities to extend the time certain public lands are open.

“This section directs the agencies to make efforts to minimize seasonal closures on lands where such closures prevent recreational activities that provide economic benefits,” the bill reads.

Hotels and housing for gateway communities

Moab locals can also confirm that finding housing in the southern Utah gateway, whether as a renter or buyer, is a monumental task. Housing shortages in mountain towns and park-adjacent communities are driving locals out and resulting in labor shortages.

Under Manchin and Barrasso’s bill, the Department of the Interior will identify solutions to housing shortages, working with local governments, housing authorities, trade associations and nonprofits.

The bill also instructs the department to “provide financial and technical assistance to gateway communities to establish, operate, or expand infrastructure to accommodate visitation including hotels and restaurants.”

Climbing on Forest Service land

A brief provision in the bill says the Forest Service will “issue guidance” on climbing management in designated wilderness areas.

The bill is not entirely clear on what that “guidance” will be, but gives the agency 18 months to develop a plan that will consider the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the “appropriateness” of recreational climbing, placement and maintenance of fixed anchors and the use of other climbing equipment.

New digital tools

Several provisions in the bill seek to improve access to real-time data, permits and reservations. Consider this:

  • The National Parks and Federal Land Pass would be available in digital format.
  • Through a pilot program, the public could obtain real-time visitation data on federal land.
  • Land agencies would experiment with new, more intuitive, ways to tally visitor data.
  • Tourists who reserved visitation to public lands that require reservations or permits, could notify agencies of certain days they will not use — those days are then granted to guide companies and the unguided public.

Modernize campgrounds

Again turning to the public-private partnership model, the bill requires agencies to develop a pilot program to modernize campgrounds and buildings on Forest Service and BLM land.

Agreements with private companies would not last more than 30 years, and within three years of obtaining land use authorization, the company is required to spend at least $2 million on improvements.

Filming and photographing public lands

Buried at the end of the bill is a provision that would “modernize film and photography permitting on public lands to account for changing technology and social media.”

Production crews of less than eight people would not have to obtain a permit. Any filming or photography “that is merely incidental to an otherwise authorized or allowable activity” will not need a permit, either.

As always, readers are invited to link to their own organizations’ bill analysis.

Forest Service Defeats Appeal for Climate Update to Forest Plan

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This sounds like an interesting case… does anyone have access to Bloomberg Law and can post excerpts from their story? Thanks to Nick Smith for this snippet. Ah… plans.

The U.S. Forest Service doesn’t need to update a plan for a Montana forest to account for climate change because the plan doesn’t qualify as an ongoing federal action, the Ninth Circuit affirmed Friday. The ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit came as a loss to the Cottonwood Environmental Law Center. The group argued the agency was required to update the 1987 Gallatin Forest Plan after it recognized in 2012 that forest plans needed updates due to climate change.

But doesn’t the Custer-Gallatin have a 2020 plan? Perhaps someone can explain..

Prescribed Fire Escapes and Building Trust: Three New Mexico News Stories

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It appears that Peter Williams and I are coasting along the stream of the Zeitgeist as I saw two stories this morning (from Nick Smith, thank you!) specifically on building trust around prescribed fire.

This is based on the Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico, a prescribed burn that got out of control and merged with the Calf Canyon Fire. Here’s one story.

Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernandez sent the Forest Service a letter, asking if there has been an investigation, what protocols are in place to prevent a controlled burn from getting out of control, and when those protocols were last updated.

Sen. Luján said lawmakers on Capitol Hill are in the process of making changes as well.

“There are a few pieces of legislation that the members of the delegation are working on,” he said. They specifically aim to change how the federal agency decides an area is safe for a prescribed burn.

“Who allowed that fire to take place and everything, that I’ve been told, is that when that decision was made to do the prescribed burn, that based on the model, it met the parameters, it was that it was safe—well, clearly, it wasn’t!”” Sen. Luján said. “One thing that doesn’t make any sense to me is we have a federal agency who’s responsible for weather predictions NOAA, why wouldn’t we just use their weather predictions to be able to make decisions like this as well, that’s just one example.”

Here’s an editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican. It sounds like they are calling for increased transparency around procedures.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham this week called for the federal government to change its rules about prescribed burns. She’s exactly right, and our congressional delegation should lead the charge in demanding all federal agencies managing land in New Mexico update procedures for approving and lighting burns. Part of the discussion has to be other methods of removing fuels from the forest, whether sustainable logging or targeted grazing.

In 2000, the devastating Cerro Grande Fire near Los Alamos began as prescribed burn, not by the Forest Service, but by the National Park Service. That fire, ignited May 4, 2000, and burned more than 43,000 acres and destroyed hundreds of homes.

Twenty-two years later, it’s déjà vu.

In mid-March, a prescribed burn for the Gallinas Watershed in the Santa Fe National Forest near Las Vegas, N.M., was delayed because of snow on the ground. On April 6, the burn, named Las Dispenas Prescribed Burn, went ahead, with disastrous consequences.

A report from the Las Vegas Optic on April 6 was matter-of-fact: “A prescribed burn in the Las Dispensas treatment area, in the Santa Fe National Forest north of Las Vegas turned into a wildfire Wednesday afternoon, the Optic has learned.” At that time, the fire was estimated at 100-plus acres.

The decisions that led to the go-ahead for the burn must be examined in detail. A red-flag warning — meaning ideal conditions for wildland fire ignition — was in effect for much of the region that day. Conditions at the burn launch, though, were predicted to be calmer, fire managers have said.

The exact language: “forecasted weather conditions were within parameters for the prescribed burn.”

The obvious question: Just what were those parameters? Because when unexpected, erratic winds kicked up in the afternoon, the fire went rogue. Once the winds blew and sparks dispersed, the Hermits Peak Fire was born. Which begs another question: Did the U.S. Forest Service have adequate crews on hand in case the fire got out of hand?

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To that end, Lujan Grisham is insisting federal prescribed burn guidelines need reviewing. That process should begin as soon as possible. This debate is crucial to Santa Fe. We’re not burning — yet — but any of the prescribed burns planned for the watershed here could go wrong. The city has a definite interest in making fire choices less risky.

I’m not sure what models were used, but that reminded me of this earlier story from the Albuquerque Journal:

Modeling tools

Rod Linn, leader of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s atmospheric modeling and weapons phenomenology team, studies how fire interacts with the atmosphere.

“The buoyancy that comes from the heating of the fire feeds back on the wind field around the fire, and redirects it and changes the way it then heats the unburned fuel and spreads,” Linn said.

LANL worked with the Forest Service to develop the FIRETEC tool, which models the shape and growth of wildland fires and prescribed burns.

FIRETEC runs on supercomputers and is primarily used for researching past fire behavior.

A newer LANL modeling tool, QUIC-Fire, can run on a laptop and is more accessible for crews planning fires or predicting wildfire growth.

The tool helps agencies design ignition patterns and predict where smoke will flow.

The lab was not involved in helping plan the prescribed burn that turned into the Hermits Peak Fire.

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And perhaps an even broader question, what causes people to trust models?  Would be interesting to do a survey of fire behavior analysts.  Which perhaps circles back to what makes people trust climate models? Are the factors the same for micro and macro models? And what about the role of institutions (Forest Service, IPCC)?

Science Friday: From Caveats to Certitude in Wildfire-Climate Relationships

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Proportion of variance explained by top-ranking multiple regression models of seasonal climate influence on annual fire activity for (A) federal lands and (B) NEON domains in the continental United States. Fig. 4 in Syphard et al. 2017 paper.

A while back I thought I had linked to this WaPo story “Massive wildfires helped fuel global forest losses in 2021” but I got totally sidetracked and so am posting it now. I’m sure it’s an interesting story. But this is how I got sidetracked.

The article said:

In a recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that human-caused emissions have significantly increased the area burned by wildfires the American West and British Columbia.
So I wrote the reporter,because the link wasn’t to the IPCC,  and the reporter replied that the link is the study that the IPCC referenced.  So let’s take a look at that study.
First, the study was of BC, not BC and the American West.  The authors don’t make that claim, as far as I can tell. It’s about weather (affected by climate and AGW) and how that impacts fires.  And  I think it’s worth looking at the authors’ own set of caveats.
The result is dependent on the regression model being realistic. Our regression model assumes that nonclimatic variability in the natural log of area burned is stationary in time and does not account for the possible influence of human factors such as changes in forest management or human ignition sources. Humans have long had a direct influence on fire activity (Bowman et al., 2011), and trends in some regions have been strongly impacted by human intervention (Fréjaville & Curt, 2017; Parisien et al., 2016; Turco et al., 2014). Syphard et al. (2017) demonstrated that climate influence on fire activity becomes less important with a strong human presence. We also do not consider directly the impacts of repeated suppression over time, which could result in larger fires, nor do we consider the pine beetle infestation that has affected BC (Kurz et al., 2008), although such a disturbance did not impact large-scale area burned in the United States (Hart et al., 2015). Nonetheless, consistency of our finding with attribution of an increase in fire risk and previous studies demonstrating that climate change is an important driver of changes in fire behavior in many regions of North America (Gillett et al., 2004; Littell et al., 2009; Morton et al., 2013) supports the finding of a substantial contribution of anthropogenic climate change to the risk of a burned area as large as that in 2017.
My bold. It appears the links to the cited papers in the paper itself work, but not from this excerpt.  So if you want to go to a cited paper you have to go back to the original paper . This from the conclusions was also interesting:
 While we find no evidence that anthropogenic influence contributed to the risk of extremely dry conditions, we find that it has substantially increased the risk of warm conditions, elevated wildfire risk, and large area burned comparable to those observed.
The Syphard et al paper  (2017) I hadn’t seen before (or have forgotten?) and was interesting.. here’s an excerpt from the results:
Of the 10 different variables we explored to explain the variation in the strength of fire-climate relationships, none were statistically significant at P ≤ 0.05 except for the anthropogenic variables (Table 1 and Figs. S1 and S2). In the federal data, regions in close proximity to either roads or developed areas had weaker fire-climate relationships; and in the FPA FOD data, regions with a higher mean human population and proportion of developed land had weaker fire-climate relationships.
More folks around, less direct relationship between climate and fire.  It raises many interesting questions, as the authors say in the discussion. Hopefully the authors are continuing to explore them.
Humans can affect wildfire patterns in a number of ways, from starting fires to managing fires (e.g., prescribed fire or fire suppression) and via changes in the abundance and continuity of fuel through land use decisions. For example, humans alter native vegetation through agriculture, urbanization, and forestry management practices. Although their geographical subdivisions were coarser than those used here, regions where lightning-started fires dominated in a recent nationwide analysis (27) show some alignment with areas here where fire-climate relationships were stronger, largely in the interior, northwestern part of the country. Nevertheless, although human-caused ignitions predominate across most of the country, there are also regions like the interior Southeast where fire-climate relationships were relatively strong but the cause of ignitions was nevertheless dominated by humans.
This suggests that human influence goes beyond just starting fires, and there is some combination of factors that leads to a dampening of the effect of climate on fire activity. This may be due to effective lengthening of the fire season (27), or starting fires in areas where naturally occurring fires are rare. On the other hand, fragmentation of fuels via land use and urban development may interrupt the spread of fires that would otherwise occur in a less human-dominated landscape. In this case, the climatological factors that might otherwise lead to fire spread are overridden by human-created landscape patterns. This dual effect of humans either increasing fire where it would not otherwise occur, or decreasing it where it would occur, may be why the overall amount of fire in a region was not significantly related to the importance of climate. A couple of other studies performed at smaller extents also suggest that human influence [i.e., suppression policy (40) or land use (33)] in addition to fuel quantity or quality (31, 33) can potentially mediate or dampen fire-climate relationships across different temporal scales.
One of the most consistently important variables for explaining strong fire-climate relationships was prior-year precipitation, which is similar to results in other studies (e.g., refs. 28, 30, and 35). This relationship is often found in grasslands and savannahs where fire activity is fuel-limited. High precipitation appears to have a dampening effect on current-year fires but leads to high fuel loads in subsequent years, and the production of fine-fuel biomass that dries by the following year is conducive to fire spread (41). In forested ecosystems, this relationship has been shown to be present in forest types with herbaceous understories and absent in ones with understory fuels comprising litter and other downed material (42)
An important caveat to this study is the fact that the variance explained for the differences in strength of fire-climate relationships was not particularly high, and there was substantial variability in the data (Figs. S1 and S2). Therefore, despite evaluating the role of climatic or topographic variability, or variation in vegetation or forest biomass, differences in strength of fire-climate relationships may be due to additional factors. For example, temperature or precipitation patterns may be less variable in some regions than in others, meaning there is less annual variability in fire activity due to these variables. Another reason may be that the fire-climate models do not include essential factors such as localized fire-weather events, long-term drought, or lightning density, nor do they account for variable interactions or more complex variable combinations.
Maybe “fire activity” and “acres burned” are different measures?
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If for some reason you are still interested in this topic. I went to the 3500 or so page IPCC report and searched on Kirchmeier-Young, the first author of the paper.  And much to my surprise and delight, I found these paragraphs (page 2-53) which summarize how sure the IPCC is, and which sources they cited. I’m fascinated by how the authors got from the caveats in the KY et al. paper to robust evidence- high agreement.  Plus the differences in dryness as a factor. I suppose it’s mostly a function of different conditions in different places.
Since the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report and the IPCC Special Report on Land, published research has
24 detected increases in the area burned by wildfire, analysed relative contributions of climate and non-climate
25 factors, and attributed burned area increases above natural levels to anthropogenic climate change in one part
26 of the world – western North America (robust evidence, high agreement) (Abatzoglou and Williams, 2016;
27 Partain et al., 2016; Kirchmeier‐Young et al., 2019; Mansuy et al., 2019; Bowman et al., 2020b). Across the
28 western United States, increases in vegetation aridity due to higher temperatures from anthropogenic climate
29 change doubled burned area from 1984 to 2015 over what would have burned due to non-climate factors,
30 including unnatural fuel accumulation from fire suppression, with the burned area attributed to climate
31 change accounting for 49% (32-76%, 95% confidence interval) of cumulative burned area (Abatzoglou and
32 Williams, 2016). Anthropogenic climate change has doubled the severity of a southwest North American
33 drought from 2000 to 2020 that has reduced soil moisture to its lowest levels since the 1500s (Williams et
34 al., 2020), driving half of the increase in burned area (Abatzoglou and Williams, 2016; Holden et al., 2018;
35 Williams et al., 2019). In British Columbia, Canada, the increased maximum temperatures due to
36 anthropogenic climate change increased burned area in 2017 to its highest extent in the 1950-2017 record,
37 seven to eleven times the area that would have burned without climate change (Kirchmeier-Young et al.,
38 2019). In Alaska, USA, the high maximum temperatures and extremely low relative humidity due to
39 anthropogenic climate change accounted for 33‒60% of the probability of wildfire in 2015, when the area
40 burned was the second highest in the 1940-2015 record (Partain et al., 2016). In protected areas of Canada
41 and the United States, climate factors (temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, evapotranspiration
change accounting for 49% (32-76%, 95% confidence interval) of cumulative burned area (Abatzoglou and
32 Williams, 2016). Anthropogenic climate change has doubled the severity of a southwest North American
33 drought from 2000 to 2020 that has reduced soil moisture to its lowest levels since the 1500s (Williams et
34 al., 2020), driving half of the increase in burned area (Abatzoglou and Williams, 2016; Holden et al., 2018;
35 Williams et al., 2019). In British Columbia, Canada, the increased maximum temperatures due to
36 anthropogenic climate change increased burned area in 2017 to its highest extent in the 1950-2017 record,
37 seven to eleven times the area that would have burned without climate change (Kirchmeier-Young et al.,
38 2019). In Alaska, USA, the high maximum temperatures and extremely low relative humidity due to
39 anthropogenic climate change accounted for 33‒60% of the probability of wildfire in 2015, when the area
40 burned was the second highest in the 1940-2015 record (Partain et al., 2016). In protected areas of Canada
41 and the United States, climate factors (temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, evapotranspiration)
accounted for 60% of burned area from local human and natural ignitions
1 from 1984 to 2014, outweighing
2 local human factors (population density, roads, and built area) (Mansuy et al., 2019).
3
4 In summary, field evidence shows that anthropogenic climate change has increased the area burned by
5 wildfire above natural levels across western North America in the period 1984-2017, at global mean surface
6 temperature increases of 0.6ºC -0.9ºC, increasing burned area up to 11 times in one extreme year and
7 doubling burned area over natural levels in a 32 year period (high confidence).