[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," we'll look at wildfires and their climate and societal connections.

- Fire weather is getting worse, meaning temperature, humidity, those sorts of things.

[Scott] Okay.

- Two, we're moving into areas which catch on fire and should catch on fire.

- Interesting.

We have more people and we have more structures.

[Lori] In the path of fire.

- In the path of fire.

- One-third of our population today in the U.S. lives in this type of areas, and many of them are not well-informed.

[Scott] Interesting - And you can summarize it as, we're gonna have fire one way or the other.

And you're gonna have smoke one way or the other.

- I like that.

- And it's up to us to choose, to some extent, what type of fire and smoke that is.

[Scott] Interesting.

Up next on "Energy Switch," a surprising discussion on wildfires.

[Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by, The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

We often hear there are more wildfires.

In some places, that's true, but globally, it's not.

We often hear they're caused by climate change.

In some places, it contributes, but there are many other factors, which have made some areas more fire-prone and fires more intense and more damaging when they happen.

On top of this, millions more people now live in fire areas while firefighters are stretched beyond their limits.

We'll talk about all this with Lori Moore-Merrell.

She leads the United States Fire Administration.

For 25 years before that, she held executive positions at the International Association of Firefighters.

Brian Buma is a senior climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, a National Geographic Explorer, and formerly an associate professor at the University of Colorado.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," we'll talk about wildfires.

So, welcome.

Welcome to "Energy Switch."

- Thank you.

- Thanks.

- Glad you're both here.

Let's just start with the number.

We hear, often, there's more wildfires than ever.

Maybe that's true, I don't know.

Lori, I mean, take us through just the number to start.

- Even today as we are talking, there are multiple states on fire.

We've got 64 active fires plus another 15 that are being mitigated, if you will, or suppressed and contained.

Is this year different from last year?

Yes.

We've already burned well over five million acres, which is about triple what we did last year.

So do we see this consistent from year to year?

Not just yet, but those that are burning that impact communities are growing.

And if they reach the community, then there is a greater intensity because of the fuel load that's picked up in the communities.

- Okay.

- So if it's not just trees burning and we hit communities, now, we've got a different ballgame.

And I think that's the difference we're seeing.

- And you're talking U.S., their numbers.

- Yes.

- As you look broader than that, Brian, what do you see?

- Yeah, if we look back to the year 2000 globally, fires are down, the number of fires are actually down.

They seem to be dropping a little over a percent.

[Scott] Globally?

- Globally.

[Scott] Okay.

- A little over a percent a year.

And we tend to go back to 2000 because that's when we launched some satellites that are particularly good at monitoring fires.

- So we can count 'em?

- Yeah, so we can count 'em.

- Okay, accurate data.

- So the number seems to be going down.

And in the U.S., it seems to be fairly consistent.

The number of lightning-ignited fires has actually, seems to have gone down since the mid-2000s.

Human fires are similar, though.

We keep setting fires ourselves.

Now, the one thing we should mention is fire weather, like the conditions in which they burn are getting worse year after year.

- So globally, number down a little bit since 2020, maybe let's call it kind of flat but with a lot of variability.

- A lot of variability.

- U.S. numbers, up and down.

Area burned, more this year, three times than last year.

- Yes.

- And intensity being, what does intensity mean?

- So it's sort of perspective.

If we're talking about the fire's intensity from a firefighter perspective, how big is it and how fast is it moving?

Can I get in front of it?

Do we have enough resources?

If we're talking about intensity for public impact or community impact, now we're talking about the scope and scale of how many structures burned, how many people were evacuated.

- Right, we have more people and we have more structures.

- In the path of fire.

- In the path of fire.

- And that's the key, that we literally are putting communities in the path of fire in areas that have historically burned.

And because we've cleared some vegetation and put buildings there, we think they're no longer fire-prone.

And it's not the case.

They are fire-prone, so one-third of our population today in the U.S. lives in this type of areas.

And many of them are not well-informed- - One-third?

- About the threat.

- One-third.

[Scott] Hundred million people?

[Brian] About a hundred million.

- Yes.

Yes.

- And over a trillion in assets.

- In the U.S.

Literally, and many of them not built fire-resistant in fire-prone lands.

[Scott] Why is that?

- I mean, they're nice places to live.

[chuckles] I mean, I'm as guilty as anyone.

I live in a fire-prone landscape along with many other people.

- That'd be like a geologist living in a flood-prone zone.

- Sure, yeah.

- Oh, I do.

[laughing] - Because it's nice.

So they're part of the landscape.

- Yeah, no, fires are very much a natural part of the landscape.

Vegetation around the world has evolved with fire.

I've been all over, and there are very few places with plants that don't catch on fire, vanishingly few.

So we've been living with fire for many, many millennia here.

[Scott] I wanna make sure I understand.

It's needed?

- It is totally necessary.

I would say fires are as important to any given ecosystem as precipitation amounts or as annual temperature or as deer.

- Interesting.

- I mean, it's not a separate thing.

And it's important for people to realize that fire cannot be separated from ecosystems.

It is a part of its identity as much as anything else.

- One of the things, if I may just- - Yeah, yeah, sure.

- On what Brian is saying, we, people in the U.S. particularly, are guilty of changing that ecosystem not only by where we've built, which we've addressed, but I will refer to the tribal lands.

The tribal culture always used fire to maintain their ecosystem, to maintain their lands, and we stopped.

We Americans stopped some of their capabilities to burn on their own lands because we thought somehow fire was bad.

And so that too has contributed to the fuel load we have today.

The vegetative fuel load that we have today, that's become so problematic.

[Scott] Interesting.

- Across the nation.

- Okay, this is gonna be a terrible pun.

I just thought of it, though.

So, fires are going extinct.

- I love a good pun.

- I mean, like a species, we wouldn't let species go extinct.

- No, I agree.

- We are suppressing fire.

- That's the only mode we know right now is suppress them because we're not using enough fire, prescribed fire.

Beneficial fire, we'll call it, on the lands to reduce the vegetation that becomes a fuel load.

- Okay.

- And so they're fighting back with a vengeance, we'll say, those fire as they ignite.

They are coming back because there's so much fuel for them to burn.

- But to add on to what you're saying, it is really important to keep people in this loop because indigenous communities have been managing fires for a long time.

There was one estimate in California suggests that pre-1800, about 88% of the landscape that is currently burning, used to burn.

So like we're approaching and have only just recently surpassed what people were doing for the past 10, you know, 10,000 years or whatever.

- Yeah, so in the why, people might say, "Oh, that's a great idea, but don't burn it here."

[Brian] Yeah.

[Scott] Is that part of it?

- That's exactly right.

- That's exactly what they say.

[chuckles] We've moved into areas where fires used to be common and for understandable reason.

And we build houses and we moved in really fast.

And for understandable reasons, people are afraid- - Yeah.

- Of it.

- It's also the smoke impact because we have built in the path of fire.

There's a couple of things we need to educate people on the difference in the smoke.

If it's beneficial fire and we can just burn vegetation, that's a huge piece, right?

Yes, there's gonna be some smoke, but is that smoke as bad as the smoke that's gonna come from the fire when it hits your community?

The toxins that are burnt in the built environment are much worse.

That's carcinogenic smoke.

There's a difference.

- So the plastics and the woods and the batteries and everything we have in our houses.

- Yes.

- And you can summarize it as we're gonna have fire one way or the other.

And you're gonna have smoke one way or the other.

- I like that.

- And it's up to us to choose, to some extent, what type of fire and smoke that is.

- That's interesting.

Part of this is global warming, the things humans are doing to warm the planet.

What's the impact of that on fires?

And then, how is that felt?

- Sure.

- Yeah.

- We can start with the IPCC, which has very strong confidence that fire weather is getting worse.

Meaning, temperature, humidity, those sorts of things.

[Scott] Okay.

- If you go to the actual number of fires, it's only about medium confidence that the number of fires is really being affected at global scales.

Even if it's hard to see in the signal now, we know climate change was going to make fires in many parts of the world worse.

And so whether we're seeing that signal in the data now or not is almost immaterial because we expect it to come.

Two, we're moving into areas which catch on fire and should catch on fire.

[Scott] Interesting.

[Lori] I wanna come back around and add just another variable- - Yeah, sure.

- To this whole equation.

So I think Brian is spot on with adding in that it's not one thing.

It is the coupling of things that happen.

So the variables of climate change plus where we're building.

I'm gonna add another one, the workforce to be able to deal with the suppression of the fires that are occurring.

Right now, we are what's called a preparedness level five.

That's the highest level of preparedness.

Our people are being burned out because they're deployed for long times.

And now, who's going to go in and start to continue the response or the suppression of these fires?

- Right.

Big challenge.

Let me come back just a minute to the infrastructure piece.

I think you're saying, Lori, that we're actually using materials and things now that are potentially worse than we used to use in the past.

Did I hear that correctly?

- Absolutely accurate.

What we are not paying attention to is the structures being built to fire-resistant.

And so this is absolutely a must-do, and yet we're not doing it.

- Is it a cost issue only or is it more- - That's what is claimed that it's a cost issue.

But here's the key.

Is it a enough of a cost issue that you're gonna be able to build it back after it burns?

[Scott] Right.

Let's talk a little bit about energy infrastructure and its relationship to fires and things we might be able to do to remedy or avoid some of those impacts.

- Well, when I think about the energy infrastructure, then my mind immediately goes to poles with wires and, you know, in wind-driven events how quickly those wires come down for ignition, points of ignition.

Yeah, so what can we do to change that?

Is that undergrounding of wires, which a lot of communities have begun, particularly in California, because they've had to.

- Gotta be more expensive to do that.

- It is in some communities.

And some communities cannot do undergrounding, right?

So they've got terrain that's just not conducive to that.

[Scott] Right.

- I think about changing out wooden poles to metal in places that cannot underground.

And my mind will go to, you know, Maui, Hawaii, who is doing that?

- Are wires, is that a big source of sort of fire starting?

- In California, specifically, they're five-year average is about nine percent of fires started by electrical grid infrastructure compared to five percent for lightning.

So it's sort of in the same ballpark.

It's relatively small.

- Got you.

- And so that tends to happen when conditions are bad.

[Scott] Yeah.

- And likely for fire spreads.

So just 'cause it's a, you know, proportionally small number doesn't mean it's a proportionately low impact.

And so other things are like preemptive shutting down of power during wind events, that's impactful.

People don't like that.

So one of the things we can do is building a more resilient grid, a more networked grid, so you have a better chance of shutting off power in areas vulnerable to these problems while not necessarily shutting off a large number of people to access to power.

[Scott] We like our electricity on.

- We do.

- Yes, one of the other things that we're doing is building these large energy storage systems with huge lithium ion batteries, and they're being built primarily in rural communities.

Well, what do we know about rural communities?

Many of them are in the wildland-urban interface that is fire-prone, and yet we're putting even those, that infrastructure many times in fire-prone land.

- Yeah, it's interesting, we build earthquake-resistant structures in earthquake-prone areas-- - Or we retrofit them.

- Or we retrofit, and so we need to do this more-- - Absolutely.

- And perhaps go a little further and say you wouldn't build a house without paying attention to how cold it gets in the winter.

- Without insulation.

- Yeah, you wouldn't build a house without insulation.

You'd pay attention how cold it is.

If you're building a house in a hot area, you're gonna pay attention to how much air conditioning you'll need or whatever.

[Scott] Sure.

- You should give fires the exact same level of consideration.

- You mentioned earlier that in some places, it's raining more.

- Yeah, that's true.

- That's what change is, climate change, what does rain do to fires?

- So there was this evocative title of a paper that's published a couple years ago called "Fire And Rain Are One."

And the idea is-- - Sounds like an album cover.

- Yeah.

[chuckles] - I like that.

- I could see that, yeah.

So rain, when rain comes, it tends to produce a lot of vegetation growth.

And this is primarily true in Mediterranean ecosystems, so we're talking mostly California areas with cool, wet winters; dry, hot summers.

Fire tends to follow heavy rain years, especially in California by one or two years.

So you'll get a heavy rain, you get a lot of rain in the winter, you'll get a big flush of grass.

Maybe that first year it's okay, but the next year it'll dry out.

This is also true where I live in Colorado.

We had the largest fire in state history, most destructive fire in state history, the Marshall Fire, a thousand homes or so, was a grass fire.

And it was preceded by wet years.

- There are communities after, not just the Marshall Fire, but the Waldo Canyon fire, I mean we could name them, when communities begin to take notice and they realize they must be fire adapted, and so they control the vegetation around their home.

They go out and they trim the landscape.

They keep things off their home, right?

So these are the kinds of lessons learned.

They are hard lessons learned.

- Right, people do pay attention.

There is xeriscaping, but one of the challenges we're seeing is a lot of people moving into the area that haven't yet learned those lessons.

[Lori] Right.

[Scott] Right.

- And so, again, it's almost, it's a collective forgetting about the fire.

- It's perpetual.

- And it's perpetuated and it's refreshed when you get people, you know, moving in who aren't used to it.

So it's a continuing education challenge.

- We've talked about it but, you know, kinda tightly history and strategy of fire suppression in the U.S., and then how does that compare globally?

- So for thousands of years, there was pretty heavy indigenous fire management across the United States.

And this includes east of the Mississippi.

Lit by people-- - So indigenous people understood that they needed to do this-- - Sure.

- To manage their landscape?

- Yeah, and whether it was managing, you know, the likelihood of more severe fires, whether it was to increase berries and regrowth for game, I mean there's various reasons.

Fire's a tool.

[Scott] Interesting.

- So the U.S., you know, expanded.

You know, that indigenous burning obviously dropped off as populations were wiped out.

There was still wildfires, but in 1910, we had the Big Burn.

It was one of the most fiery days in our history.

Burned hundreds of thousands of acres in days.

The Forest Service, which was fairly newly formed, did not like that.

Over the next couple years, they debated what to do.

They started this thing called the 10:00 AM policy where the policy was to put out any wildfire by 10:00 AM the next day.

And so for about 50 years, we were full-on fire suppression.

And it wasn't until the late '70s that we started easing off of that 10:00 AM policy.

But by then, we had built up a pile of vegetation that probably shouldn't be there.

We'd also built up structures in our vegetation that probably shouldn't be there.

[Scott] So well-intended policy for 50 years, 10:00 AM.

- Sure, yeah.

It was intended for a variety of things, economic, safety, all sorts of things but, yeah.

- And we learned what?

- We learned not to do that.

[laughing] - Because?

- We learned that's probably a bad idea because fire, you eventually had a situation where areas that were burning on every five years just due to lightning, or your humans, hadn't.

And then, you end up with instead of sort of regular fires in low-fuel environments, you ended up with crown fires, fires that make it into the canopy, and then become a whole other animal, much more difficult.

- Often, if it's just forested areas, then let it burn.

That's what happened because that fire perpetuated the healthy landscape.

And even today in Canada, which has got major fires going on, if it's forested and not a threat to a community, they will also practice let-it-burn, right?

- Interesting.

- So it's not something that we don't do today.

[Scott] Right.

- It's because of the communities that have moved into these fire-prone lands and now the potential impact on those communities that we can't do the let-it-burn practice for the forested areas as much.

The other thing that I wanna pick up on that Brian said was the overall, right now, we are in response-and-suppression mode because we have to be.

These fires are burning.

They're impacting or potentially impact communities, we must respond and suppress.

That's all the workforce we have today.

So who's going to do the beneficial fire, the prescribed fire, we call it, on the lands to help reduce the fuel load when all of our workforce is in suppression mode?

We have to figure out a way to get in front of this.

If we were to build, according to the science that we know around fire-resistant structures, this would not be a problem.

[Scott] Interesting.

- The fire can come out of the interface, out of the forest and hit the built environment and stop because there's nothing to burn.

[Scott] Interesting.

- And we're not gonna be able to do it, by the way, with new construction.

We're going to have to retrofit these communities that are already in these spaces.

And you mentioned earlier, insurance.

Can we just talk about that impact for a second?

Because- - Sure, all of our favorite topics.

- I know, right?

- We love insurance.

- This is something, and those who are being told by their insurers that, "We're not going to renew your policy.

We're not gonna cancel you, but we won't be renewing."

And part of that around wildfires that the insurance itself is the risk is calculated differently than any other natural risk.

If we were talking about floodplains, for example, if they're looking at a floodplain and getting you flood insurance, then they're just gonna look at your home.

If they're looking at hurricanes and the impact of wind or water events, it's just your home.

For wildfire, that's not the case.

If you're in a fire-prone community, you could do everything right.

Stones, no mulch, no vegetation, everything's back.

No wood decks, no wood fences, you know, proper roofing materials.

Everything is correct, but your neighbor doesn't or the neighbor across the street doesn't, you're still not getting insurance.

If we would build to code what we know, there's a Wildland-Urban Interface Building Code.

If we could do that, now insurance becomes much less of an issue.

They will insure because the risks are lower.

- Anything to add to that?

- I would only emphasize that it's an especially large problem because retrofitting is simply not an option for most people.

- Right.

- It's simply too expensive.

- It's expensive, yeah.

- So one worries that we're going to enter a period where we transform through tragedy.

And that's not a happy place to be to be staring down that future.

- Is the season getting longer?

If so, where?

Is it longer everywhere and why the fire season, if you will?

- Yeah, it is getting longer in many places.

This is one of those things where it's mostly driven by precipitation, the timing of precipitation.

But the most recent well-done study I'm aware of was in California, and they found the fire season has increased about 27 days, let's say a month, over the past 60 years.

- That's a lot.

- And this isn't, that's a lot.

And it's not necessarily a reduction in total precipitation, it's just a narrowing of the precipitation season.

- I mean, I can flip it back and say, "Okay, there's a month less rain," which doesn't grow more stuff, right?

- Oh, no, no, this is irrespective of how much it rains.

- Oh, okay.

- So if you get more intense rains over the winter-- - In a shorter period.

- And you get a longer dry period.

One of the bigger signals we see, again, out West with wildland fires is snow.

And this is just pure physics from climate change.

If it gets warmer, you get a shorter snow season.

- Yeah.

- And once snow starts melting, it melts off fast.

And so that's probably the most visible manifestation.

And again, it's sort of regardless of how much snow you have, you just have a longer snow-free period.

- And so this is a climate-driven phenomena.

- Yeah.

- This season.

- Oh, it's absolutely a contributing factor.

I mean, if you were to ask that same question you just asked, is it getting longer?

Is the season getting longer?

Ask the firefighters on the fire ground, they'll absolutely tell you, yes.

- So you get to reach into over a hundred million households right now and share with them a few final thoughts.

What would you have them take away?

- Sure, I would make sure that folks realize fire is a natural thing, it's a normal thing, it's a necessary thing.

Essentially, all of our landscapes need fire at some interval.

I would say that we've been managing it for 10,000 years, and we need to continue to conceptualize it as such, as a tool and a process that needs to exist.

But then, I'd really say, you got three choices.

You can resist fire, especially with climate change as fire weather gets worse.

You can resist it, you can adapt to it, or you can transform with it.

You know, we can continue our suppression.

That may be an option in some places.

That may even be a decent option in some places where we wanna protect the forest as rates increase.

We can adapt, so we could build more adapted homes where we don't necessarily change where we live, but we put on the metal roofs, we put the xeriscaping, the rocks.

Or we could full-on transform.

I mean, these are real tragedies when towns burn down, when houses burn down.

But we can rethink how we build back.

[Scott] Right.

- For example, towns could start putting ball fields and parking lots on their perimeter.

I mean, that's all it would take is a slight spatial rearrangement.

- Yeah.

- We could transform how we move people in and out of places.

[Scott] Yeah.

- We could really rethink not just how we live with it, but how our whole relationship can be transformed and use these as opportunities.

[Scott] Interesting.

- Because we know regardless of the noise and the patterns right now, fire's already impactful and getting more so just 'cause of people.

- Yeah, very interesting.

Lori, final thoughts?

- This wildfire issue is an all-hands approach.

If we don't all engage even in our own homes, around our own landscapes, and where we live, we are not gonna get out of suppression mode.

And so it's not until we experience a tragedy that we have this kind of opportunity.

So I'm hopeful that we won't waste the opportunities that we have to really teach people and help them become motivated to change the behaviors around interaction with fire.

- Yeah, fantastic.

Well, Lori, thank you.

I really enjoyed your visit.

- Oh, it's been my pleasure.

Thank you.

Brian, thanks.

- Thanks, thanks so much.

- Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

In the American West, fire season is now longer.

There's more heat, more dry conditions, and more wildfires.

Globally, though, fires have been declining by about one percent per year.

IPCC data does not yet show a direct connection between climate change and fires, but our experts expect to see one in the future.

There are other major contributing factors.

For nearly 100 years, the U.S. Forest Service suppressed fires, but that built up a century of deadwood and undergrowth-- fuel.

In the same period, the population grew and 100 million people now live in fire areas.

Houses were built fast and cheap and not fireproofed.

Retrofitting is expensive and insurance can be hard to get.

What many fail to understand is that fire is a natural part of the landscape.

Forestry experts now embrace the practices of indigenous people from centuries ago, prescribed burns to reduce fuel and finding ways to better coexist with wildfire.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.