This is a complaint about the quoted Clare Frank, not about a SB writer,
> By the end of October 2021, the two fires had incinerated over 1.1 million acres, an equivalent to a two-lane highway stretching over 400,000 miles — a drive around the earth’s circumference more than 16 times.
What a stupid, useless, nonsensical invention of units. I hope Frank is aware at how much this behavior (sorry) torches credibility.
Who knew a trillion dollars we more easily represented as a "stack of cash in $1 bills would measure 67,866 miles, stretching approximately 2.72 times around the Earth’s equator. If denominated in $100 bills, $1 trillion would be enough to fill 4.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools, with a total volume of 398,000 cubic feet."
Yes, because that's an argument about the largest value note that should be issued, which is a real, substantive policy question (at least for central bankers)
A reasonable sized briefcase will carry about 25,000 bills, ie about $2.5million in $100s, or about €12.5million in €500s. The ECB has decided that the €500 was probably a bit too valuable and is taking it out of circulation, making the €200 the highest-value note. Eventually.
[Sidenote: 25,000 bills/notes is about sixty pounds weight. Those cool briefcases full of money should be really heavy]
The US should probably think about a $200 note at some point, especially after the current inflationary cycle. The pound sterling only goes up to £50, which is starting to be a real constraint on legitimate transactions that need to be in cash. Until the most recent redesign (2021), they had a serious counterfeiting problem (300 notes per million were counterfeit in 2009*) which is probably why the Bank of England hasn't started issuing a £100. If they can hold the line with the new note, then I expect a £100 to be in the near future.
*2009 figures on counterfeits per million notes in circulation: Swiss francs 10, Euros 64, dollars 100, pounds 300; 2022 figures: Swiss francs 10, Euros 12, pounds 42, dollars 100-250 (all from estimates from the relevant central banks).
My personal experience is paying deposits* for election candidates. Cash was the only acceptable payment. £500 for an MP was fine; £500 is cash feels a bit odd to carry around but isn't really a big deal. But for a bigger office, it can be a lot more - £50,000 for the Mayor of London is enough that it starts to require some thought about how to transport it.
* The nearest US equivalent is a filing fee, but these are refundable if you get more than a certain set percentage of the vote; they're intended as a disincentive for unserious candidates rather than as a revenue-raiser.
I mean, you need *something* to compare it to. Giving people a sense of scale strikes me as an incredibly difficult task to accomplish in a sentence or two.
Better to have measured it in the value of the board feet of lumber or enough smoke to causue a reduction of X QALY's, or y standard deviations above the 50 year mean.
I'm from California. Moved to Virginia this past winter. Was darkly interesting in a way to see easterners get a taste of the West, what we deal with every summer.
As for how to address this, I've long believed that the low and mid elevations of the Sierra Nevada (up to around 5,000 feet, maybe 6,000) need to be divided into ~10 zones, and do a massive controlled burn of one zone each summer for the next 10 years or so. That way we can proactively protect homes and towns, firefighters can be staged in areas known to be at risk in the coming burn and we can throw resources at shaping the burn in the way we want. Unfortunately California makes controlled burns almost impossible due to absurd interpretations of clean air law as well as the usual byzantine permitting BS (and it doesn't help that our grandstanding governor, and much of the state, sees any move toward sane forest management as caving to Republicans), but that's just one more speed bump we will have to overcome. I don't see any other way to overcome 120 years of terrible forest management and out of control undergrowth.
Something like half a million people live in the Sierras. I have been one of them in the past. That same year, a massive wildfire burned down an entire county (and for you easterners, a typical western county is 3-5 times the size of an eastern county - this fire burned nearly a million acres). Something has to change, and fast.
Forgive me for being jaded about this, I spent ~6 weeks a couple summers ago working outdoors, 60 hours a week, in AQI ranging from 200 to 500.
It’s a similar story in the mountain west where the vast majority of forest is owned by the federal government.
The focus on climate change is a distraction because even under the rosy assumptions, it’s still a multi-decade effort to return carbon levels to lower levels.
The long pole in this tent is 150 years of well intentioned but poor forest management that - at this point - is extremely difficult to manage. The idea of clearing out forests manually would be a massive undertaking that would also require building a lot of new roads into forests.
So I don’t think this problem has a practical solution.
I'm not an expert on this, but I've interviewed some and forest ecology is extremely complicated, and as Andy says, unhelpful practices have a very long history.
Controlled burned are definitely part of the solution. Given that our weather forecasts have gotten better they should also be less risky.
My understanding is that California’s clean air laws make it difficult to do controlled burns. I also am very curious about how much fear of legal or financial liability hinders the use of controlled burns.
Yeah, I believe I've read somewhere that controlled burns aren't allowed to exceed CA's exceedingly strict air quality limits (as if our annual uncontrolled conflagrations care one bit about silly things like laws), but I wasn' t 100% sure about this, and don't know where I'd try to find a source, so I didn't want to be the first one to bring it up here.
Another factor making controlled burns difficult is that when the topic is broached, folks get horrified by the idea that lumber companies could harvest the burned timber and... *gasp*... make money!
Ah the west coast, where it’s considered totally sane to reject a highly effective solution to a vary bad problem because someone you don’t like might at some point make money off of ir
It would also be helpful to discuss the necessity of mining to addressing climate change. We're going to need a lot of lithium, copper, and other minerals to develop electrification further, and that's going to have lots of ecological consequences, including air quality, whether that happens here or abroad. I appreciate Matt's brief discussion of air quality trading off with the gains of industrialization, but I wish that part was longer because I suspect that trade-off is going to return in salience. Especially if we're entering a period of working in the world of atoms more often than bits, as Joe Biden and Peter Thiel seem to agree is important.
Thankfully for those desiring more mining, the coalition of activist groups fighting the Thacker Pass lithium mine got derailed last year after a fit of infighting. The cause? Disagreements on, you guessed it, transgender issues. You can't make this up.
Between learning this and Rep. Jamie Raskin telling young Dems skeptical of supporting Ukraine that actually it's a war for LGBT rights, I now hope Democrats get more obsessed with LGBT issues, they are great patriots and I salute them.
If we want to power the entire United States with just solar, wind, and batteries, we will need to mine more copper than has been mined in all of human history up to now.
yeah, except we obviously will not do that, so it seems likely that technology will change and we'll use different materials?
Noah Smith talks about this a lot. It would be bucking the trend of literally every economic development of the last couple of centuries to believe that there won't be any breakthroughs here. Enough money has been spent, no one is going to just say "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ well, we used up all the copper, let's go back to oil!"
Environmental activists want that future (plus a lot of degrowth).
We have more than enough copper ore to make it happen. It is just at a much lower grade than already-depleted ore deposits. Most high-grade deposits are gone. So the volume ore needed per ton of copper is much higher, and much more mining needs to occur.
I don't take seriously anyone that wants degrowth. They are in the same category of lazy thinkers as those who think capitalism is the root of evil. Not only is it simplistic wishful thinking but it also ignores all the science.
This makes me wonder. Are there actually any plans of how to deal with this admittedly complicated problem? It’s been at the talking point stage for a while now.
In California? No. So far, as far as I can tell, the plan has been to demagogue about climate change while doing absolutely nothing about the factors that are within the state's control.
God save this nation if Newsom ever somehow becomes President, as he's been gunning for for at least 20 years. Thankfully for us I think he'd have a pretty hard time in a Dem primary, and would be absolutely doomed in the general.
It would be a beautiful dream if his awfulness were confined to the cultural issues. In a giant middle finger to every rural Californian (and really to everyone who has the misfortune of getting their power from PG&E) the state recently banned gas-powered generators. Up in Tahoe this was a big flashpoint of anger, for obvious reasons in a place that gets 25 feet of snow a year. Power outages of several days are common all across the state for different reasons in different places. I guess us mountain folk are just supposed to enjoy freezing and starving when we get a giant dump of snow that downs the power lines.
"Unfortunately California makes controlled burns almost impossible due to absurd interpretations of clean air law as well as the usual byzantine permitting BS (and it doesn't help that our grandstanding governor, and much of the state, sees any move toward sane forest management as caving to Republicans)"
As a Californian, I'd like to know more about how California and especially Newsom are falling down on the job here. It seems to me that they're actually doing the opposite:
A press release talking about plans to do things in the future =/= actually doing things. Knowing how things get bogged down I'll believe it when I see it.
Which means absolutely nothing, given the state's track record here.
Edit: did some searching. Found a signed law reducing liability in controlled burns. Better than doing absolutely nothing, but this law does not actually direct the state to do burns! Which, again, are mostly a fantasy as long as the current air quality rules remain in place. I was unable to find any legislation relating to the recommendations of this task force. So you're wrong here.
It doesn't make me feel better that these recommendations are full of claptrap about "cultural burning", whatever the hell that is. Until I see real-world smoke and fire to prove otherwise, this is a panel convoked to make all the right people feel good about themselves rather than to actually accomplish anything.
So again, what legislation is he actually signing? Show me the bill.
You do controlled burns in the winter, not summer. You do them when things are wet enough that they don’t get out of control, otherwise you’d be setting potential wildfires
This *maybe* could work in the lower foothills below around 3,000 feet. Above that, snow is frequent, and above 5,000 feet everything is socked in under feet of snow most winters. Hard to do controlled burns when there's 10 feet of snowpack.
Mostly controlled burns happen in the spring, between melt out and fire season. But it's not so much about the moisture content as it is about the workforce. The same people that manage prescribed burns also fight wildfires.
And you also don't really need to do them in areas of high snowpack, precisely because there's so much snow that the undergrowth doesn't get out of hand in the short growing season.
I mainly meant to point out that controlled burns don’t work well in hot dry conditions. When to do them is a matter for local experts, it varies a lot.
It will in a British winter, with similar weather. Takes some effort to get the fire going, but once it is, it will burn hot enough to dry out the next tree and then ignite it before the current tree is consumed.
Just to note that, if the affected cities/states in the US thought it was useful to clear flammable brush material in Canada, they could partner with the Canadians to pay to have that done - perhaps coupled with a low-wage guest-worker program so it could be done more cost-effectively (or whatever the Canadian immigration authorities were willing to go for).
It really is a huge area we’re talking about. I’d like to see some numbers on hours of labour etc. I wonder if intentional ignitions during safer-weather years might be an alternative (or complementary) approach.
Yeah it's wildly unrealistic, this seemingly can't even be done in California which has to be less then 1/10th the size with actual roads and infrastructure to move crews around.
My suspicion would be that this would worsen the problem as we're defining it today. Small particulates are the result of inefficient and incomplete combustion. Today, we want it all to burn completely to CO2 as briskly as possible. We want hot, fast, big fires, not smoldering.
"Problem as we're defining it today" isn't meant to be read as snark or conspiracy. We have different, competing problems.
The point of controlled burns is to just clear the dry underbrush so it’s not available to feed wildfires--it’s not about efficient combustion, it’s about preventing conflagrations.
Yep, I see what you’re saying. My thinking was along the lines of reducing peak smoke days by working towards a fire regime with less potential for massive or widespread events.
Healthy wildfires are low-intensity, and somewhat lower smoke. Specifically, they clean out the underbrush without igniting healthy trees, and without getting so hot they sterilize the soil.
It's because we've suppressed healthy fire so long that when a fire gets going it decimates everything. And becomes impossible to control. You can build line around a creeping undergrowth fire, but once it gets going in the trees it starts throwing sparks that jump lines.
As someone else suggested, immigrants from Haiti on special work visas. There are probably people in a lot of countries who would be glad to do this work. The money might be good compared to the cost of living where they come from and they would be able to take almost all of it back with them. It wouldn't take jobs away from Americans since no Americans want those jobs.
I'm the reply guy who always begs MY and Noah Smith to oppose low-skilled immigration, and I approve this message.
Well-defined, time-limited, government-run projects *that aren't currently being undertaken* are exactly where guestworker programs make sense. If Canada and the US could employ a significant fraction of Haiti's adult male population doing seasonal brush clearing, it would be more effective than most existing foreign aid programs and we'd have cleaner air as well.
The trick would be to overcome the predictable complaints from one section of the left who'd want them to be paid at least the minimum wage. It won't work if you do it that way.
Well... maybe? It might be that there is enough value being generate to justify paying minimum wage, in which case it would be wrong to pay less than that. Or you might offer minimum wage plus incentives for a certain amount of brush cleared... a lot of fruit-and-vegetable picking worked this way in the UK prior to brexit. Payment was by outcome, topped up to minimum wage if necessary.
I definitely was thinking you couldn't employ as many people as needed from Quebec without making the labour market so tight that no one would actually do the work for minimum wage, and allowing the extra immigration would resolve this.
Hmm... but maybe I'm okay with paying less than the minimum wage as well... I mean, we don't insist that we only import goods made at our minimum wage from poor countries. So why not import the labour directly to do something actually much more useful that make more consumer goods? But this is a very slippery slope, and we'd have to be oh-so-careful about where and when this solution is, hah, employed.
They should be paid MUCH LESS than the minimum wage, so the government can afford to hire as many of them as possible, because that will create as many jobs for Haitians as possible and make the air as clean as possible.
Probably it depends on how many people can usefully be employed doing this. If the bureaucracy can only organize 20,000 people, then you want to pay whatever reasonable wage you can afford for 20,000. But if the bureaucracy can support more, then maybe a lower wage is reasonable to fill up to whatever that capacity is.
I guess we have to read the brush-clearing paper at the link Matt provided. Homework never ends.
Just as a general observation, though, I think there's a huge amount of low-skilled "public amenities" work that isn't now being done and that would improve the quality of life in rich countries if migrant workers did it.
But to make that work you need to stick very firmly to two principles. Wages need to be kept low, because that's what generates a net benefit for the employing societies. And there can't be any path to citizenship or permanent residence, which probably means you need to rotate people out regularly by imposing a lifetime cap on years worked in country.
I read the brush-clearing paper at the link. At most, it exists at the level of throat clearing, as in "we really need to think about doing this" without any sense of what "doing this" would entail. It's not just flooding the zone with tons of cheap labor. What volume of forest materiel would have to be removed? How do you get the people into these areas which are often very difficult terrain with no fire roads (unless we want to carve up the wilderness with roads everywhere)? How much heavy equipment would have to be employed to pick up and move the materiel? Where would it all go?
I'd like to see some basic numbers on this, but my guess is that they're breathtaking.
I’m curious how you make ‘Get paid a pittance for strenuous (likely dangerous) manual labour with no pathway to legal residency’ an appealing proposition for anybody except the rich countries whose populations reap the benefits.
Minimum wage is (or should be) set on the basis of the cost of living in the relevant location, so the usual minimum wage for Quebec should be set based on the cost of living in Quebec.
Your hypothetical Haitians aren't paying the cost of living in Quebec, though. While they are in Quebec, they are provided overnight accommodation and meals in addition to their pay, and then they return to Haiti when the season ends,* so they are primarily living at the Haitian cost of living - and they are paying Haitian rents and Haitian cost of living for their spouses and children living off remittances in Haiti.
This is the basis on which it's legitimate to pay them below the Quebec minimum wage. That does mean that if they get time off where they are rotated into Montreal or Quebec City, then they should get a bonus so they can afford some actual R&R while they are there. But you could just fly them back to Haiti then they can see their families instead. Charter flights are not that expensive.
* If I understand correctly, you can't do this during fire season and Quebec gets too cold for outdoor work in midwinter, so this is a spring and autumn job.
I was imagining a cost-neutral program. Whatever the benefits of reducing the smoke/smog level would be entirely captured by the workforce clearing it. Otherwise you're just taking advantage of people.
Hopefully that would be enough to justify paying the minimum wage, but I'm not necessarily against offering the jobs at a lower wage if the benefits aren't large enough.
Matt's point, I think, was that the population of Quebec is too small to clear all this brush themselves, and my counterpoint was that there's no particular need to rely on just the population of Quebec, since the effects are felt far more broadly.
Could you elaborate on what you see as the bad incentives? As FrigidWind mentioned, California already uses inmates as firefighters, and it's a frequently sought out opportunity because it (a) let's you get out of prison while you're working and (b) usually comes with a shorter sentence. Now, you might not want to provide (b) for a relatively low risk activity, but I think there would still be demand among prisoners. And I don't think there'd be much in the way of a principal-agent problem either, prisoners don't want wildfires any more than the average person.
Mmm... well, in general we want to avoid the Star Wars: Andor situation where people are unjustly imprisoned in order to provide cheap labour to build the weapon(s) the government uses to suppress the population.
I'm not saying this would necessarily lead to that, but, it's hard to argue it isn't a step in that direction and we'd need to be very careful (as with the whole thing, in fact).
It seems like by far the most important point of this piece got kinda buried at the bottom, which is that as with so many issues the political right is just nihilist and the political left means well but is doing the wrong thing.
Specifically, as much as climate change is a big deal, this is more of a forest management problem than anything. But I don't see many people saying that or anyone doing anything about it.
It’s incredibly frustrating to see coverage of wildfires by east coast media where forest management is never mentioned.
I say this all too often but last summer Seattle had several days when it had the worst air quality in the world. The media portrayed it as primarily a result of climate change but that wasn’t true. It was a small fire in an inaccessible area during a mild wildfire season. The smoke made it to Seattle because of soem really weird atmospheric conditions. Our governor, who is all about climate change, did not insist it was mostly caused by climate change. Neither did the commissioner of public lands who is a former environmental lawyer. Her office said the area had to burn and now that it’s burned it won’t but again soon.
It was so strange to see that contrast. Who are east coast outlets hiring to cover wildfires?
The east coast outlets all have bylines. No need to ask rhetorical questions when you can just check yourself. In any case, the answer is probably a 20-something urbanite who is willing to work for low pay, since that's what most journalists are.
As an example, the George Mason University program on climate change communication (which works closely with a counterpart at Yale) is very good, actually. https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/
I live in NM, and last year we had the largest wildfire in state history. It started from embers left over in a burn pile started in January or February during routine forest management. Just crazy.
An opportunity for increased sophistication is in describing fine particulates with an understanding of their chemical lifespans, not merely their size.
Most of what we think of as interesting chemistry happens in the liquid and gas phases, where reactants mix freely and "surface area" isn't really a valid concept. PM2.5 particles are in a funny intermediate state where they are very much solid, but their surface area to volume ratio is wildly out of whack by our regular macroscopic standards.
I'm not that kind of doctor, but particles of this size are going to evolve (in reactivity, in mass, in everything) at different timescales than we're used to, just because they have so many free surface sites available for reaction. I'm not so bold as to say that because I don't have this knowledge, that this knowledge does not exist. I am bold enough to say that if we know more about these particles than just their size and frequency, we do not convey that information very well to the general public.
I imagine that the wildly variant nature of certain kinds of PM2.5 particles explains my wildly divergent experience of an AQI of 300 in Beijing and in Philadelphia.
The visual impact, level of discomfort, and feeling of dirtiness while outdoors was on a whole different level in Beijing, where the particulate was coal combustion byproducts with an admixture of ICE emissions, steel plant coking emissions, cement particulate, low-grade tire wear particles, and some exotic chemical shit.
Whereas in Philly, wood ash was almost the sole source.
Tons of trees in california straight up cannot reproduce without moderate levels of fire. Some trees in British columbia do that too, to a lesser extent.
The Inflation Reduction Act did dedicate $2.15 billion to improve forest management, to include expanding thinning operations and controlled burns. Semafor recently did a good video[1] talking about the history of forest management and the changes that are being made in the approach going forward.
For my money, I think we need to do more to discourage building permanent structures in forests. There's not going to be a lot of appetite for allowing both controlled burns (which do rarely become uncontrolled) and small accidental fires to progress naturally as long as people are afraid their homes are going to burn down. Maybe we just need to make people pay a huge fire insurance tax?
“Appreciation of the deadly nature of particulate pollution is critical to becoming nuclear-pilled because you’ll see that an extremely low-CO2 source of energy is being held to an arbitrarily high safety standard that makes it uneconomical.”
[SCREAMS INCOHERENTLY]
Repeat after me: ALARA is responsible for 10% of cost overruns. ALARA is responsible for 10% of cost overruns.
Perhaps a dumb question but does the pollution effects of wild fires remain a big problem after they’ve burnt out? Like if you were on a month long vacation and go back to the northeast in July is the air you’re breathing still going to be notably more polluted?
I think it settles out pretty quickly. I’m visiting Boston right now and I noticed that the past two days, air was just fine, with AQI below 50 (green) while last week I believe it was a lot worse and today is above 100 (yellow) though I haven’t stepped out to see what it’s like yet. I’m not sure exactly how many days it is for a plume to reach here from when it was emitted by the fire, but I think the lifespan of these plumes is measured in days, or a week or two, as long as it isn’t being refreshed from constant fires.
I am dubious that efforts to prevent starting fires will help much in the west. If that 1M acres doesn’t burn this year it’s going to burn sometime in the next 10. If your strategy is ‘not remotely enough controlled burns and limit accidental burns’, you’re just going to get massive accidental burns in a similar volume eventually, regardless of how careful you are
Dumb question, but would allowing increased grazing and/or logging decrease wild-fire risk? Both would seem plausible as methods to decrease available fuel for wildfires. Since both can be done profitably under some circumstances, would this be a more cost-effective way than hiring large numbers of people to clear brush? I read the linked article that dismisses the idea of logging without addressing grazing, but it seems helpless to just say we can’t do anything aside from preventing ignition.
Logging could make it worse if it’s done via clearcutting. Generally forests that have been subject to clearcutting are more vulnerable to devastating fires. There may be other methods that reduce the fire risk
It's a fair question and I'm happy to answer. The areas that are most vulnerable to these kinds of massive fire events in the West are not really accessible to domestic livestock, if that's what you mean. The vast majority of grazing in intermountain Western forests is done by deer and elk, which by and large have healthier populations in the 21st century than they have in decades previous (in fact, their current populations may be too large, because in most areas their primary native predator species are still extirpated).
The more pressing issue isn't really the undergrowth, and it's not the impact of warming temperatures directly -- it's vastly increased fuel load in the form of mass tree death from (typically) invasive insects and fungi, e.g. the Mountain Pine Beetle, Asian Longhorn beetle, woolly hemlock adelgid, spotted lanternfly, emerald ash borer, white spruce beetle, the Phytopthora genus of pathogens, etc. These parasitic infestations are all becoming more frequent and more geographically widespread due to warming temperatures, and heat-stressed trees are more vulnerable to death from parasitic infestation so it's a double whammy.
Unfortunately, MattY entirely misses the crux of climate change impacts on increased wildfire risk here, which I don't really blame him for. 99% of journalists with national platforms have no real day-to-day exposure to the nuances of the most pressing nature conservation issues.
If you have any more questions on the topic though, let me know. ID resident, a lot of topic-specific experience and I've grown up in an extended family of Forest Service rangers and forest ecologists.
As a child living in a steel producing town during the 1960s, I remember the air turned pink on days when one of the Mills charged a blast furnace. Thanks for all the fine particulates Republic Steel. When we visited family near Akron, were drive through there valley of the little Cuyahoga river (the non-flammable part). The tire plants were concentrated there and it stunk. Of course, all those industries are gone now. The Clean Air Act ideas often blamed. Although outdated factories and foreign competition are the real culprits.
owning the libs by engaging in nihilist epistemology assassination!” stunt that turns out to be really, really dumb when you spend two seconds thinking about what he said.
This is a complaint about the quoted Clare Frank, not about a SB writer,
> By the end of October 2021, the two fires had incinerated over 1.1 million acres, an equivalent to a two-lane highway stretching over 400,000 miles — a drive around the earth’s circumference more than 16 times.
What a stupid, useless, nonsensical invention of units. I hope Frank is aware at how much this behavior (sorry) torches credibility.
All the water on earth would fill up the fuel tanks of 2.3 trillion mid-sized sedans!
Let me just randomly convert an area measure to a linear one…
an equivalent to 5.5 billion miles of human hair, enough to wrap around the earth more than 2.2 million times.
Two-lane highways have easily-understandable-to-normal-people width, though?
I am quite confident that no one has a bloody clue how much *area* is represented by 400k miles of highway.
If you wish to create an impactful statement, “Five times the area of New York City” would do fine.
Here in the western U.S., I suspect that most people don't have a very good sense of New York City's physical size.
This struck me as a very California analog to reach for.
Except for the "two lane" highway part.
It sounds a lot worse than ‘40 miles by 40 miles.’
Even worse, it lets someone say "Americans will use any form of measurement but metric" on the Internet again.
If it were an 8-lane highway it would only circle the Earth two times which sounds a lot more comforting.
Yeah, this is an absurd analogy. A better example is one western county or 3-5 eastern counties. 1.1 million acres is about 1600 square miles.
Stacks of dollar bills would like a word as the most useless unit of measure.
EDIT: https://www.cnbc.com/2009/04/08/What-Does-$1-Trillion-Look-Like.html
Who knew a trillion dollars we more easily represented as a "stack of cash in $1 bills would measure 67,866 miles, stretching approximately 2.72 times around the Earth’s equator. If denominated in $100 bills, $1 trillion would be enough to fill 4.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools, with a total volume of 398,000 cubic feet."
Swimming pools should only be filled with gold coins
The only money-to-volume conversion that's at all useful is "how much fits in an attache case."
Yes, because that's an argument about the largest value note that should be issued, which is a real, substantive policy question (at least for central bankers)
A reasonable sized briefcase will carry about 25,000 bills, ie about $2.5million in $100s, or about €12.5million in €500s. The ECB has decided that the €500 was probably a bit too valuable and is taking it out of circulation, making the €200 the highest-value note. Eventually.
[Sidenote: 25,000 bills/notes is about sixty pounds weight. Those cool briefcases full of money should be really heavy]
The US should probably think about a $200 note at some point, especially after the current inflationary cycle. The pound sterling only goes up to £50, which is starting to be a real constraint on legitimate transactions that need to be in cash. Until the most recent redesign (2021), they had a serious counterfeiting problem (300 notes per million were counterfeit in 2009*) which is probably why the Bank of England hasn't started issuing a £100. If they can hold the line with the new note, then I expect a £100 to be in the near future.
*2009 figures on counterfeits per million notes in circulation: Swiss francs 10, Euros 64, dollars 100, pounds 300; 2022 figures: Swiss francs 10, Euros 12, pounds 42, dollars 100-250 (all from estimates from the relevant central banks).
As someone who recently had to pay a vendor a large sum in cash (crotchety but excellent caterer in a niche cuisine), I agree on the $200 bill lol.
My personal experience is paying deposits* for election candidates. Cash was the only acceptable payment. £500 for an MP was fine; £500 is cash feels a bit odd to carry around but isn't really a big deal. But for a bigger office, it can be a lot more - £50,000 for the Mayor of London is enough that it starts to require some thought about how to transport it.
* The nearest US equivalent is a filing fee, but these are refundable if you get more than a certain set percentage of the vote; they're intended as a disincentive for unserious candidates rather than as a revenue-raiser.
When’s the wedding?
Lol it was 3 weeks ago
I mean, you need *something* to compare it to. Giving people a sense of scale strikes me as an incredibly difficult task to accomplish in a sentence or two.
Better to have measured it in the value of the board feet of lumber or enough smoke to causue a reduction of X QALY's, or y standard deviations above the 50 year mean.
What the end of this makes clear is that we really messed up in 1812 when we failed to successfully invade
Never too late for Operation Rake!
54 40 or Fight!
I'm from California. Moved to Virginia this past winter. Was darkly interesting in a way to see easterners get a taste of the West, what we deal with every summer.
As for how to address this, I've long believed that the low and mid elevations of the Sierra Nevada (up to around 5,000 feet, maybe 6,000) need to be divided into ~10 zones, and do a massive controlled burn of one zone each summer for the next 10 years or so. That way we can proactively protect homes and towns, firefighters can be staged in areas known to be at risk in the coming burn and we can throw resources at shaping the burn in the way we want. Unfortunately California makes controlled burns almost impossible due to absurd interpretations of clean air law as well as the usual byzantine permitting BS (and it doesn't help that our grandstanding governor, and much of the state, sees any move toward sane forest management as caving to Republicans), but that's just one more speed bump we will have to overcome. I don't see any other way to overcome 120 years of terrible forest management and out of control undergrowth.
Something like half a million people live in the Sierras. I have been one of them in the past. That same year, a massive wildfire burned down an entire county (and for you easterners, a typical western county is 3-5 times the size of an eastern county - this fire burned nearly a million acres). Something has to change, and fast.
Forgive me for being jaded about this, I spent ~6 weeks a couple summers ago working outdoors, 60 hours a week, in AQI ranging from 200 to 500.
It’s a similar story in the mountain west where the vast majority of forest is owned by the federal government.
The focus on climate change is a distraction because even under the rosy assumptions, it’s still a multi-decade effort to return carbon levels to lower levels.
The long pole in this tent is 150 years of well intentioned but poor forest management that - at this point - is extremely difficult to manage. The idea of clearing out forests manually would be a massive undertaking that would also require building a lot of new roads into forests.
So I don’t think this problem has a practical solution.
Superlike™️.
I'm not an expert on this, but I've interviewed some and forest ecology is extremely complicated, and as Andy says, unhelpful practices have a very long history.
Controlled burned are definitely part of the solution. Given that our weather forecasts have gotten better they should also be less risky.
My understanding is that California’s clean air laws make it difficult to do controlled burns. I also am very curious about how much fear of legal or financial liability hinders the use of controlled burns.
Yeah, I believe I've read somewhere that controlled burns aren't allowed to exceed CA's exceedingly strict air quality limits (as if our annual uncontrolled conflagrations care one bit about silly things like laws), but I wasn' t 100% sure about this, and don't know where I'd try to find a source, so I didn't want to be the first one to bring it up here.
Another factor making controlled burns difficult is that when the topic is broached, folks get horrified by the idea that lumber companies could harvest the burned timber and... *gasp*... make money!
Ah the west coast, where it’s considered totally sane to reject a highly effective solution to a vary bad problem because someone you don’t like might at some point make money off of ir
It would also be helpful to discuss the necessity of mining to addressing climate change. We're going to need a lot of lithium, copper, and other minerals to develop electrification further, and that's going to have lots of ecological consequences, including air quality, whether that happens here or abroad. I appreciate Matt's brief discussion of air quality trading off with the gains of industrialization, but I wish that part was longer because I suspect that trade-off is going to return in salience. Especially if we're entering a period of working in the world of atoms more often than bits, as Joe Biden and Peter Thiel seem to agree is important.
Thankfully for those desiring more mining, the coalition of activist groups fighting the Thacker Pass lithium mine got derailed last year after a fit of infighting. The cause? Disagreements on, you guessed it, transgender issues. You can't make this up.
Between learning this and Rep. Jamie Raskin telling young Dems skeptical of supporting Ukraine that actually it's a war for LGBT rights, I now hope Democrats get more obsessed with LGBT issues, they are great patriots and I salute them.
If we want to power the entire United States with just solar, wind, and batteries, we will need to mine more copper than has been mined in all of human history up to now.
yeah, except we obviously will not do that, so it seems likely that technology will change and we'll use different materials?
Noah Smith talks about this a lot. It would be bucking the trend of literally every economic development of the last couple of centuries to believe that there won't be any breakthroughs here. Enough money has been spent, no one is going to just say "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ well, we used up all the copper, let's go back to oil!"
Environmental activists want that future (plus a lot of degrowth).
We have more than enough copper ore to make it happen. It is just at a much lower grade than already-depleted ore deposits. Most high-grade deposits are gone. So the volume ore needed per ton of copper is much higher, and much more mining needs to occur.
I don't take seriously anyone that wants degrowth. They are in the same category of lazy thinkers as those who think capitalism is the root of evil. Not only is it simplistic wishful thinking but it also ignores all the science.
Useful reading is the "Won't we run out of materials?" section in this article. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-against-evs-are
This makes me wonder. Are there actually any plans of how to deal with this admittedly complicated problem? It’s been at the talking point stage for a while now.
In California? No. So far, as far as I can tell, the plan has been to demagogue about climate change while doing absolutely nothing about the factors that are within the state's control.
I can't speak for other states.
But we have time to push an impossible constitutional amendment to restrict firearms ownership, lol.
God save this nation if Newsom ever somehow becomes President, as he's been gunning for for at least 20 years. Thankfully for us I think he'd have a pretty hard time in a Dem primary, and would be absolutely doomed in the general.
I’m glad that he’s been on the right side of the housing issue, is getting on the right side of environmental regulation reforms, etc.
But shut up about literally every cultural issue, please, I beg you.
It would be a beautiful dream if his awfulness were confined to the cultural issues. In a giant middle finger to every rural Californian (and really to everyone who has the misfortune of getting their power from PG&E) the state recently banned gas-powered generators. Up in Tahoe this was a big flashpoint of anger, for obvious reasons in a place that gets 25 feet of snow a year. Power outages of several days are common all across the state for different reasons in different places. I guess us mountain folk are just supposed to enjoy freezing and starving when we get a giant dump of snow that downs the power lines.
This is also the core problem Kamala Harris faces.
California passed a decent amount of legislation in 2021.
This is some of the legislation from 2021. Obviously, we have yet to see the actual fruits of many of these.
https://sr01.senate.ca.gov/wildfire-related-legislation-2021-2022-session
"Unfortunately California makes controlled burns almost impossible due to absurd interpretations of clean air law as well as the usual byzantine permitting BS (and it doesn't help that our grandstanding governor, and much of the state, sees any move toward sane forest management as caving to Republicans)"
As a Californian, I'd like to know more about how California and especially Newsom are falling down on the job here. It seems to me that they're actually doing the opposite:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/03/30/governors-task-force-launches-strategic-plan-to-ramp-up-wildfire-mitigation-with-prescribed-fire-efforts/
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/04/13/governor-newsom-signs-landmark-536-million-wildfire-package-accelerating-projects-to-protect-high-risk-communities/
A press release talking about plans to do things in the future =/= actually doing things. Knowing how things get bogged down I'll believe it when I see it.
He's actually signing legislation.
Which means absolutely nothing, given the state's track record here.
Edit: did some searching. Found a signed law reducing liability in controlled burns. Better than doing absolutely nothing, but this law does not actually direct the state to do burns! Which, again, are mostly a fantasy as long as the current air quality rules remain in place. I was unable to find any legislation relating to the recommendations of this task force. So you're wrong here.
It doesn't make me feel better that these recommendations are full of claptrap about "cultural burning", whatever the hell that is. Until I see real-world smoke and fire to prove otherwise, this is a panel convoked to make all the right people feel good about themselves rather than to actually accomplish anything.
So again, what legislation is he actually signing? Show me the bill.
You do controlled burns in the winter, not summer. You do them when things are wet enough that they don’t get out of control, otherwise you’d be setting potential wildfires
This *maybe* could work in the lower foothills below around 3,000 feet. Above that, snow is frequent, and above 5,000 feet everything is socked in under feet of snow most winters. Hard to do controlled burns when there's 10 feet of snowpack.
Mostly controlled burns happen in the spring, between melt out and fire season. But it's not so much about the moisture content as it is about the workforce. The same people that manage prescribed burns also fight wildfires.
And you also don't really need to do them in areas of high snowpack, precisely because there's so much snow that the undergrowth doesn't get out of hand in the short growing season.
I mainly meant to point out that controlled burns don’t work well in hot dry conditions. When to do them is a matter for local experts, it varies a lot.
It will in a British winter, with similar weather. Takes some effort to get the fire going, but once it is, it will burn hot enough to dry out the next tree and then ignite it before the current tree is consumed.
Just to note that, if the affected cities/states in the US thought it was useful to clear flammable brush material in Canada, they could partner with the Canadians to pay to have that done - perhaps coupled with a low-wage guest-worker program so it could be done more cost-effectively (or whatever the Canadian immigration authorities were willing to go for).
It really is a huge area we’re talking about. I’d like to see some numbers on hours of labour etc. I wonder if intentional ignitions during safer-weather years might be an alternative (or complementary) approach.
Yeah it's wildly unrealistic, this seemingly can't even be done in California which has to be less then 1/10th the size with actual roads and infrastructure to move crews around.
My suspicion would be that this would worsen the problem as we're defining it today. Small particulates are the result of inefficient and incomplete combustion. Today, we want it all to burn completely to CO2 as briskly as possible. We want hot, fast, big fires, not smoldering.
"Problem as we're defining it today" isn't meant to be read as snark or conspiracy. We have different, competing problems.
The point of controlled burns is to just clear the dry underbrush so it’s not available to feed wildfires--it’s not about efficient combustion, it’s about preventing conflagrations.
Yep, I see what you’re saying. My thinking was along the lines of reducing peak smoke days by working towards a fire regime with less potential for massive or widespread events.
Healthy wildfires are low-intensity, and somewhat lower smoke. Specifically, they clean out the underbrush without igniting healthy trees, and without getting so hot they sterilize the soil.
It's because we've suppressed healthy fire so long that when a fire gets going it decimates everything. And becomes impossible to control. You can build line around a creeping undergrowth fire, but once it gets going in the trees it starts throwing sparks that jump lines.
Maybe a combination of controlled burns and brush clearing. Paying under minimum wage is ok if meals and lodging are provided, IMO.
who wants to do hard, physical work in the middle of nowhere for less than minimum wage plus board
As someone else suggested, immigrants from Haiti on special work visas. There are probably people in a lot of countries who would be glad to do this work. The money might be good compared to the cost of living where they come from and they would be able to take almost all of it back with them. It wouldn't take jobs away from Americans since no Americans want those jobs.
Infantrymen. Call the Marines.
I'm the reply guy who always begs MY and Noah Smith to oppose low-skilled immigration, and I approve this message.
Well-defined, time-limited, government-run projects *that aren't currently being undertaken* are exactly where guestworker programs make sense. If Canada and the US could employ a significant fraction of Haiti's adult male population doing seasonal brush clearing, it would be more effective than most existing foreign aid programs and we'd have cleaner air as well.
The trick would be to overcome the predictable complaints from one section of the left who'd want them to be paid at least the minimum wage. It won't work if you do it that way.
Well... maybe? It might be that there is enough value being generate to justify paying minimum wage, in which case it would be wrong to pay less than that. Or you might offer minimum wage plus incentives for a certain amount of brush cleared... a lot of fruit-and-vegetable picking worked this way in the UK prior to brexit. Payment was by outcome, topped up to minimum wage if necessary.
I definitely was thinking you couldn't employ as many people as needed from Quebec without making the labour market so tight that no one would actually do the work for minimum wage, and allowing the extra immigration would resolve this.
Hmm... but maybe I'm okay with paying less than the minimum wage as well... I mean, we don't insist that we only import goods made at our minimum wage from poor countries. So why not import the labour directly to do something actually much more useful that make more consumer goods? But this is a very slippery slope, and we'd have to be oh-so-careful about where and when this solution is, hah, employed.
They should be paid MUCH LESS than the minimum wage, so the government can afford to hire as many of them as possible, because that will create as many jobs for Haitians as possible and make the air as clean as possible.
Fight me
Probably it depends on how many people can usefully be employed doing this. If the bureaucracy can only organize 20,000 people, then you want to pay whatever reasonable wage you can afford for 20,000. But if the bureaucracy can support more, then maybe a lower wage is reasonable to fill up to whatever that capacity is.
I guess we have to read the brush-clearing paper at the link Matt provided. Homework never ends.
Just as a general observation, though, I think there's a huge amount of low-skilled "public amenities" work that isn't now being done and that would improve the quality of life in rich countries if migrant workers did it.
But to make that work you need to stick very firmly to two principles. Wages need to be kept low, because that's what generates a net benefit for the employing societies. And there can't be any path to citizenship or permanent residence, which probably means you need to rotate people out regularly by imposing a lifetime cap on years worked in country.
I read the brush-clearing paper at the link. At most, it exists at the level of throat clearing, as in "we really need to think about doing this" without any sense of what "doing this" would entail. It's not just flooding the zone with tons of cheap labor. What volume of forest materiel would have to be removed? How do you get the people into these areas which are often very difficult terrain with no fire roads (unless we want to carve up the wilderness with roads everywhere)? How much heavy equipment would have to be employed to pick up and move the materiel? Where would it all go?
I'd like to see some basic numbers on this, but my guess is that they're breathtaking.
I’m curious how you make ‘Get paid a pittance for strenuous (likely dangerous) manual labour with no pathway to legal residency’ an appealing proposition for anybody except the rich countries whose populations reap the benefits.
Minimum wage is (or should be) set on the basis of the cost of living in the relevant location, so the usual minimum wage for Quebec should be set based on the cost of living in Quebec.
Your hypothetical Haitians aren't paying the cost of living in Quebec, though. While they are in Quebec, they are provided overnight accommodation and meals in addition to their pay, and then they return to Haiti when the season ends,* so they are primarily living at the Haitian cost of living - and they are paying Haitian rents and Haitian cost of living for their spouses and children living off remittances in Haiti.
This is the basis on which it's legitimate to pay them below the Quebec minimum wage. That does mean that if they get time off where they are rotated into Montreal or Quebec City, then they should get a bonus so they can afford some actual R&R while they are there. But you could just fly them back to Haiti then they can see their families instead. Charter flights are not that expensive.
* If I understand correctly, you can't do this during fire season and Quebec gets too cold for outdoor work in midwinter, so this is a spring and autumn job.
I was imagining a cost-neutral program. Whatever the benefits of reducing the smoke/smog level would be entirely captured by the workforce clearing it. Otherwise you're just taking advantage of people.
Hopefully that would be enough to justify paying the minimum wage, but I'm not necessarily against offering the jobs at a lower wage if the benefits aren't large enough.
Matt's point, I think, was that the population of Quebec is too small to clear all this brush themselves, and my counterpoint was that there's no particular need to rely on just the population of Quebec, since the effects are felt far more broadly.
Trade Offer!
I get You get
Free healthcare Brush clearance
That would be reprehensible in the case of the mentally ill, and would create a significant bad-incentives problem in the case of convicts.
Could you elaborate on what you see as the bad incentives? As FrigidWind mentioned, California already uses inmates as firefighters, and it's a frequently sought out opportunity because it (a) let's you get out of prison while you're working and (b) usually comes with a shorter sentence. Now, you might not want to provide (b) for a relatively low risk activity, but I think there would still be demand among prisoners. And I don't think there'd be much in the way of a principal-agent problem either, prisoners don't want wildfires any more than the average person.
Mmm... well, in general we want to avoid the Star Wars: Andor situation where people are unjustly imprisoned in order to provide cheap labour to build the weapon(s) the government uses to suppress the population.
I'm not saying this would necessarily lead to that, but, it's hard to argue it isn't a step in that direction and we'd need to be very careful (as with the whole thing, in fact).
To be clear, it’s also reprehensible in the case of convicts.
Let's not forget that useful work gives meaning to lives that are sorely lacking it in prison. Not just my opinion, I've heard it from prisoners
It seems like by far the most important point of this piece got kinda buried at the bottom, which is that as with so many issues the political right is just nihilist and the political left means well but is doing the wrong thing.
Specifically, as much as climate change is a big deal, this is more of a forest management problem than anything. But I don't see many people saying that or anyone doing anything about it.
It’s incredibly frustrating to see coverage of wildfires by east coast media where forest management is never mentioned.
I say this all too often but last summer Seattle had several days when it had the worst air quality in the world. The media portrayed it as primarily a result of climate change but that wasn’t true. It was a small fire in an inaccessible area during a mild wildfire season. The smoke made it to Seattle because of soem really weird atmospheric conditions. Our governor, who is all about climate change, did not insist it was mostly caused by climate change. Neither did the commissioner of public lands who is a former environmental lawyer. Her office said the area had to burn and now that it’s burned it won’t but again soon.
It was so strange to see that contrast. Who are east coast outlets hiring to cover wildfires?
The east coast outlets all have bylines. No need to ask rhetorical questions when you can just check yourself. In any case, the answer is probably a 20-something urbanite who is willing to work for low pay, since that's what most journalists are.
Plenty of people on the right are saying this, and trying to do something about it.
As an example, the George Mason University program on climate change communication (which works closely with a counterpart at Yale) is very good, actually. https://www.climatechangecommunication.org/
I live in NM, and last year we had the largest wildfire in state history. It started from embers left over in a burn pile started in January or February during routine forest management. Just crazy.
An opportunity for increased sophistication is in describing fine particulates with an understanding of their chemical lifespans, not merely their size.
Most of what we think of as interesting chemistry happens in the liquid and gas phases, where reactants mix freely and "surface area" isn't really a valid concept. PM2.5 particles are in a funny intermediate state where they are very much solid, but their surface area to volume ratio is wildly out of whack by our regular macroscopic standards.
I'm not that kind of doctor, but particles of this size are going to evolve (in reactivity, in mass, in everything) at different timescales than we're used to, just because they have so many free surface sites available for reaction. I'm not so bold as to say that because I don't have this knowledge, that this knowledge does not exist. I am bold enough to say that if we know more about these particles than just their size and frequency, we do not convey that information very well to the general public.
I imagine that the wildly variant nature of certain kinds of PM2.5 particles explains my wildly divergent experience of an AQI of 300 in Beijing and in Philadelphia.
The visual impact, level of discomfort, and feeling of dirtiness while outdoors was on a whole different level in Beijing, where the particulate was coal combustion byproducts with an admixture of ICE emissions, steel plant coking emissions, cement particulate, low-grade tire wear particles, and some exotic chemical shit.
Whereas in Philly, wood ash was almost the sole source.
Tons of trees in california straight up cannot reproduce without moderate levels of fire. Some trees in British columbia do that too, to a lesser extent.
The Inflation Reduction Act did dedicate $2.15 billion to improve forest management, to include expanding thinning operations and controlled burns. Semafor recently did a good video[1] talking about the history of forest management and the changes that are being made in the approach going forward.
For my money, I think we need to do more to discourage building permanent structures in forests. There's not going to be a lot of appetite for allowing both controlled burns (which do rarely become uncontrolled) and small accidental fires to progress naturally as long as people are afraid their homes are going to burn down. Maybe we just need to make people pay a huge fire insurance tax?
[1] https://youtu.be/hyMSPJjULQY
Analogous to coastal management policy (one of my hobbyhorses). Disaster policy is a mess!
“Appreciation of the deadly nature of particulate pollution is critical to becoming nuclear-pilled because you’ll see that an extremely low-CO2 source of energy is being held to an arbitrarily high safety standard that makes it uneconomical.”
[SCREAMS INCOHERENTLY]
Repeat after me: ALARA is responsible for 10% of cost overruns. ALARA is responsible for 10% of cost overruns.
Really interesting article, although certainly worth highlighting the role and potential for indigenous fire management in this arena.
Perhaps a dumb question but does the pollution effects of wild fires remain a big problem after they’ve burnt out? Like if you were on a month long vacation and go back to the northeast in July is the air you’re breathing still going to be notably more polluted?
It disperses very rapidly and settles out somewhat less so, much faster when it rains.
I think it settles out pretty quickly. I’m visiting Boston right now and I noticed that the past two days, air was just fine, with AQI below 50 (green) while last week I believe it was a lot worse and today is above 100 (yellow) though I haven’t stepped out to see what it’s like yet. I’m not sure exactly how many days it is for a plume to reach here from when it was emitted by the fire, but I think the lifespan of these plumes is measured in days, or a week or two, as long as it isn’t being refreshed from constant fires.
Yes, sort of: it's really bad for kids https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-australia-wildfire-toxic-legacy/
This describes long-term effects from short-term exposure, not long-term risk to new exposure. Totally different things.
Last week did really suck. I am glad I still got a stock of N95s.
I am dubious that efforts to prevent starting fires will help much in the west. If that 1M acres doesn’t burn this year it’s going to burn sometime in the next 10. If your strategy is ‘not remotely enough controlled burns and limit accidental burns’, you’re just going to get massive accidental burns in a similar volume eventually, regardless of how careful you are
Dumb question, but would allowing increased grazing and/or logging decrease wild-fire risk? Both would seem plausible as methods to decrease available fuel for wildfires. Since both can be done profitably under some circumstances, would this be a more cost-effective way than hiring large numbers of people to clear brush? I read the linked article that dismisses the idea of logging without addressing grazing, but it seems helpless to just say we can’t do anything aside from preventing ignition.
Logging could make it worse if it’s done via clearcutting. Generally forests that have been subject to clearcutting are more vulnerable to devastating fires. There may be other methods that reduce the fire risk
What about grazing? Cattle, sheep, goats? Doesn’t seem crazy that they would consume a lot of underbrush.
It's a fair question and I'm happy to answer. The areas that are most vulnerable to these kinds of massive fire events in the West are not really accessible to domestic livestock, if that's what you mean. The vast majority of grazing in intermountain Western forests is done by deer and elk, which by and large have healthier populations in the 21st century than they have in decades previous (in fact, their current populations may be too large, because in most areas their primary native predator species are still extirpated).
The more pressing issue isn't really the undergrowth, and it's not the impact of warming temperatures directly -- it's vastly increased fuel load in the form of mass tree death from (typically) invasive insects and fungi, e.g. the Mountain Pine Beetle, Asian Longhorn beetle, woolly hemlock adelgid, spotted lanternfly, emerald ash borer, white spruce beetle, the Phytopthora genus of pathogens, etc. These parasitic infestations are all becoming more frequent and more geographically widespread due to warming temperatures, and heat-stressed trees are more vulnerable to death from parasitic infestation so it's a double whammy.
Unfortunately, MattY entirely misses the crux of climate change impacts on increased wildfire risk here, which I don't really blame him for. 99% of journalists with national platforms have no real day-to-day exposure to the nuances of the most pressing nature conservation issues.
If you have any more questions on the topic though, let me know. ID resident, a lot of topic-specific experience and I've grown up in an extended family of Forest Service rangers and forest ecologists.
As a child living in a steel producing town during the 1960s, I remember the air turned pink on days when one of the Mills charged a blast furnace. Thanks for all the fine particulates Republic Steel. When we visited family near Akron, were drive through there valley of the little Cuyahoga river (the non-flammable part). The tire plants were concentrated there and it stunk. Of course, all those industries are gone now. The Clean Air Act ideas often blamed. Although outdated factories and foreign competition are the real culprits.
You gotta love the Matt Walsh “I’m so cleverly
owning the libs by engaging in nihilist epistemology assassination!” stunt that turns out to be really, really dumb when you spend two seconds thinking about what he said.
Matt Walsh is sofaking stupid.