Nearly 2 Million Acres Burned In 2018 California Wildfires
The 2018 California wildfire season emitted as much carbon dioxide as is created by the generation of an entire year’s worth of electricity, according the the U.S. Geological Survey.
Wildfires throughout California are estimated to have released emissions around 68 million tons of carbon dioxide. That is equal to 15 percent of California’s emissions for the year.
Stephen Pyne is a professor of Life Sciences at ASU and has studied forest fires for decades. Pyne said fire is unlike most other physical disasters because it depends on the living world for energy in the form of biomass.
“In a place like California if people left overnight, California would still burn and it would burn explosively and there would be fires that would burn all the way to the Pacific Ocean, so your not going to eliminate the fundamentals of those conditions," Pyne said.
Pyne also said that although we want to prevent and contain bad fires, at the same time we want to promote good fires. Good fires enhance the environment and make it more inhabitable for ourselves and other creatures.