In terms of productivity, California has the 4th highest GDP per capita. But despite that, there has been a significant net migration out of California to other states because the quality of life has deteriorated so much. People are voting with their feet.
> because the quality of life has deteriorated so much
The data does show a net outflow but says nothing about the reason. I’m willing to believe the quality of life has something to do with it, but would be interesting to see the breakdown of who’s exactly leaving by county/age/income.
This sort of flamewar comment will get you banned here. We've had to warn you about this many times before. Not cool.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. That means making substantive points thoughtfully, and with respect for other users, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are.
It is what it is. Part of leading the world's sixth largest economy is that the scale of your disasters is also bigger.
I'm surprised it wasn't done before this as you really don't want to have to do evacuations of tourists on top of your evacuations of residents.
However, most vacationers/tourists are done as school has restarted in most places (for better or worse). So, this isn't likely to impact voting much.
As a side note: early ballots so far have been high. Lots of Democratic voters are pissed about this recall (it's costing a couple hundred million dollars for no good reason) and seem to be pretty motivated. That's probably good news for Newsom. However, don't take it for granted--go vote, dammit. Because the idiots behind this recall sure will.
The scale of forest fires in California has little to do with the scale of our state economy. If our economy was smaller we wouldn't necessarily have fewer wildfires.
The recall election costs $276M. To put that in perspective it's about 0.1% of the state annual budget.
This always comes off as buck-shifting to me. Newsom is the governor of the 5th largest economy in the world, I'm sure there are many unconventional mechanisms available to him to get action on these things.
National Forests are federal land owned and managed by the federal government. Why would you think the governor of any state would seize those forests? Even if California decided to force those forests to be open...they're being closed because of the extreme fire danger in many parks. Why in the world would the state want to open them up?
Fires don't care about property lines. A fire that starts in a National Forest will happily burn through an adjacent state forest or community.
> Why would you think the governor of any state would seize those forests?
Why would you come to that conclusion? He's a politician, I would assume he'd use _political_ pressure to get action.
> Fires don't care about property lines.
Precisely. If the land is being managed in a way that is raising risk and danger to surrounding land, why would you stand idly by and defer to Washington D.C?
Much of the land in California, and throughout the west actually, is owned and managed by the federal government. State government doesn't have jurisdiction, they don't have funding, etc, to do much about that. The BLM isn't just an acronym used for Black Lives Matters (as wall as national forest land and national park land).
Newsom has been governor for two years, and you expect that all power lines in fire-risk areas could've been buried in that amount of time? And in national forests controlled by the federal government, not the state/Newsom?
Some powerlines are over 100 years old. There's untold miles of lines they PG&E themselves don't even have mapped. No way it could be resolved in 2 years.
Which would generate complaints like 'Newsom BANKRUPTS Californians - sends electricity bills SKY HIGH' or the like. Not that I'm a fan of Newsom particularly, but a lot of loudest political voices in the state aren't interested in any particular policy solutions, they're just against whatever comes along.
> Regarding reducing the fuel load, in an interview four months ago, Newsom said that there are “Hundreds of millions of dead trees” in the state and that it cost his father $35,000 to clear “a small little patch of dead trees” on his property.
> Newsom didn’t admit it, but the outrageous cost to remove a few dead trees from private land is a consequence of California’s Byzantine environmental regulatory patchwork.
That quote is about privately-owned land, not federally-owned land. You and the post you're responding to are both correct; the state is responsible for some areas, and the federal government is responsible for others.
You’re missing something here. Fires can start on private and state land and then spread to national forests. Also, more and more Californians are moving away from the coast into rural suburbs due to cost of living. Additionally, due to COVID lockdowns, more people are camping than ever. Fires aren’t started by climate change, they’re started by humans.
I'll grant that perhaps I misinterpreted your response as saying, "No". Without additional comment from you in that post (you only replied with a quote), it's hard to know exactly what you're trying to say.
>Fires can start on private and state land and then spread to national forests.
And they can also start on federal land and spread to private/state land. Hence my comment that both federal and state governments are responsible for fire mitigation/prevention.
>Also, more and more Californians are moving away from the coast into rural suburbs due to cost of living.
I am not sure what this has to do with my comment. But, moving inward towards forests may mean that you're residing on state land right next to a federally-owned forest.
>Additionally, due to COVID lockdowns, more people are camping than ever. Fires aren’t started by climate change, they’re started by humans.
Okay? I didn't say anything about climate change or cause of fires. All I said was that both federal and state governments are responsible for their own areas. Each need to be doing a better job; mitigation can be improved across the board to reduce wildfire strength on state and federal lands, cause of fires be damned.
But, for what it's worth, many fires have been triggered by storms during extra dry, hot weather and severe winds caused by climate change.
I believe that in 2021, most of the wildfires in the west have been started by lightning rather than human error. If so, your final sentence is not really true, and might even be false.
Although I'm not sure what difference it really makes vs. more heavily managing public land but our local planning commission makes it essentially impossible to remove trees.
This is in an extreme fire risk area.
Also, it's quite expense to remove general green waste. High dump fees, long distances to dump, burn piles not allowed, impossible to throw away various types of plants outside house garbage flow.
