Today’s monster fires result largely from three human forces: taxpayer-funded fire suppression that has made the forest a tinderbox; policies that encourage construction in places that are clearly prone to burning; and climate change, which has worsened everything.

In the latest piece of evidence, a study published in July by the American Geophysical Union concluded that climate change is “very likely” the main reason that, between 1972 and 2018, the acreage burned annually in California jumped fivefold and the acreage burned in summertime forest fires surged eightfold.

The costs of those fires are soaring. The federal government spent more than $3 billion suppressing wildfires in 2018—nearly five times what it spent 20 years ago, in inflation-adjusted terms. Beyond fire suppression, taxpayers are forking over large sums to help bail out people who lose homes, and communities that lose infrastructure. The Federal Emergency Management Agency puts the tab at $94.3 million for aid it provided in the wake of the Carr Fire.

“In some instances, would it just be cheaper to buy the land and keep it from being developed? The answer’s clearly yes,” says Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based research group that focuses on disasters.

Despite mounting science pointing to the contrary, the conviction that all wildfire is bad wildfire has guided decades of federal and state policy, perhaps nowhere more than in California. After a century of fire suppression, the accumulated vegetation in the forest is “like an explosion ready to happen,” says Eric Knapp, a research ecologist at the Forest Service’s office in Redding, Shasta’s county seat. “What climate change has done is make those fuels more volatile.”

Read the full article about deadly wildfire policy by Jeffrey Ball at Mother Jones.