A single, devastating California fire season wiped out years of efforts to cut emissions

A nearly two-decade effort by Californians to cut their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide may have been erased by a single, devastating year of wildfires, according to UCLA and University of Chicago researchers. He said that’s the essence of the study’s title, “Up In Smoke,” because “a lot of the hard-earned gains to fight climate change could be wiped out if we don’t start changing the way that we manage the forests, manage the interface between human activity and the wildland-urban interface, and really start tracking these emissions more carefully and comparing them with other major sources so that we don’t unwittingly think that we’re meeting our climate goals when we’re not.” Dave Clegern, a spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, said the agency does not consider wildfire emissions when assessing its progress toward greenhouse gas targets because the targets are specific to human-caused emissions. However, that will soon change, because new guidance from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has clarified that to achieve carbon neutrality, “we must consider all emissions sources and sinks,” Clegern said. “Even if long-term regrowth occurs, however, the carbon emissions occurring in the next 15 20 years will make it difficult to reach emission reduction targets needed to avert the increases in mean global temperature advocated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Rajinder Sahota, deputy executive officer of the Air Resources Board, discussed the study’s findings on KPCC’s “AirTalk” on Wednesday. She said California’s 2020 greenhouse gas targets, set in 2006, were “focused on the root cause of climate change, which is energy and combustion of fossil fuels in the state.” “What we didn’t know then, and what we’ve learned now, is that the climate impacts have accelerated,” Sahota said, noting that the combustion of fossil fuels has contributed to the intensification of wildfires in the last decade.