New California Replacement Tire Standards [⛔️ ADMIN WARNING: NO POLITICS]

[Owl]

Its crazy because every other state can do it for a lot less. That is a simple fact. I've lived in seven other states. This one is the worst in regard to being efficient and reasonable outcomes.

And the argument that its because we have so many people... well all of those people pay taxes (or should). And if they don't... that is also part of the problem.

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[MilesTeg]

Its crazy because every other state can do it for a lot less. That is a simple fact. I've lived in seven other states. This one is the worst in regard to being efficient and reasonable outcomes.

And the argument that its because we have so many people... well all of those people pay taxes (or should). And if they don't... that is also part of the problem.

There is a massive disparity in how self sufficient various states are, and how much they give a damn about the environment. California is not only self sufficient, but also sends a massive amount of money to other states. You can go to, say, Wyoming and get much cheaper gas, because Californians pay more than Wyominites to maintain Wyoming roads.

 

[EasternSierra]

Its crazy because every other state can do it for a lot less. That is a simple fact. I've lived in seven other states. This one is the worst in regard to being efficient and reasonable outcomes.

And the argument that its because we have so many people... well all of those people pay taxes (or should). And if they don't... that is also part of the problem.

California has unique environmental conditions - unusually persistent temperature inversions coupled with many mountain ranges - that make air pollution here far worse for the same amount of emissions. That's why it's been a leader in air pollution control for over 60 years, and it's also why emissions controls need to be a lot stiffer here than elsewhere.

 

[MilesTeg]

California has unique environmental conditions - unusually persistent temperature inversions coupled with many mountain ranges - that make air pollution here far worse for the same amount of emissions. That's why it's been a leader in air pollution control for over 60 years, and it's also why emissions controls need to be a lot stiffer here than elsewhere.

Yep, Colorado along the front range (i.e. where most of the people live) has similar problems (2/3 of days this summer have been heavy smog even far from Denver) and I'm quite glad we finally adopted some of California's regs built specifically to combat that.

Are those regs perfect? Hell no! Are things going to be more expensive? Yep! Is that preferable to breathing poisonous air? You betcha!

 

[AZ_Liberty]

Those fuel blends started being used in the late 80s or early 90s no? When a 10 cent difference would be about a 10-20% difference in cost.. like it is today. No?

Cali's goofy fuel blend, which we also use in Phoenix in summer, adds about 80 cents a gallon. The primary difference in the fuel is additives to reduce evaporation.

Maybe that made sense in the 80s. But since 1996 all light duty gas vehicles sold in the US have had ODBII and sealed gas caps.

 

[23OBX2.7]

It's all senseless need to change to renewable wooden / cellulose tires and biowaste fuels to offset Canadas horrific forest mismanagement that's now polluting when western hemisphere with endless fires producing the worst pollution.

It's so bad everything gets covered in ash to chunks of character.....good thing for indoor parking, Dyson big air purifiers and charcoal cabin filters.

 

[GroovyGeek]

This may be a nothingburger for now, but those of us in California have enough battle scars to be suspicious. A quick rundown of how we are being "protected":

• CARB spouts, which generate far more VOC vapor via spillage than they prevent
• Cannot buy nation-wide extended warranty from Grainger, at least not before providing a friend's address from another state (wink, wink)
• Cannot use many high-durability laquers. The resurfaced cabinets in my kitchen are showing wear after 4 years
• Window tint... or rather the lack thereof, at least in any meaningful amounts

 

[EasternSierra]

It's all senseless need to change to renewable wooden / cellulose tires and biowaste fuels to offset Canadas horrific forest mismanagement that's now polluting when western hemisphere with endless fires producing the worst pollution.

It's so bad everything gets covered in ash to chunks of character.....good thing for indoor parking, Dyson big air purifiers and charcoal cabin filters.

Most of those forests burning are in very remote roadless areas and have never been managed, certainly not back in the previous centuries before there were so many fires there.

The forests there are drying out due to a substantially warming climate in far northern areas. That's why they're burning far more than they used to. I know a lot of people don't want to hear that and will assume the worst about my intelligence. Cue the laughing emojis. I don't care.

 

[Brian_B]

The forests there are drying out due to a substantially warming climate in far northern areas. That's why they're burning far more than they used to.

There is truth here.

The forests are changing. I live inside the borders of the Sierra National Forest, and have lived either in or on the border of the forest for around 20 years. Even in just that short 20 year span I can spout off a handful of things that have changed.

Now - some change is normal; nothing stays static, including forests. If this change is "normal", I can't say. It doesn't follow any pattern from my lifetime, nor those who have lived around here longer than me. It doesn't seem to follow any meteorological pattern from since we started recording such things. But that doesn't mean there may not be a longer cycle we just can't see from our narrow slice of time. And I won't deny, it very well could be human-induced; we will never have a zero-footprint, and we are a part of nature and will impact it just as much as the trees and the wildlife (we are just semi-cognizant that we are doing so).

Wildfires today are more violent than any in living memory. Fires big enough to have their own weather patterns. I can recall seeing the fire tornado as it swept over the San Joaquin River toward Mammoth Pools from the Creek Fire back in 2020 - that went right through a very popular OHV area -- including Coyote Lake, which we just had a trip report from recently, and the famous Ducy-Ershim Trail. The burn scars are still all around that area (and will be for decades). And it got within 7 miles of my home.

Maybe hundreds or thousands of years ago they cycled like this, I can't say. But it's scary as hell watching one bear down on you or your home. I've just resigned that one day my house will probably be involved in a wildfire; it's only stuff, and as long as my family and I can get out alive, we can rebuild or relocate.

As far as mis-management goes. There are definitely things that could be done better there. We put a pitiful amount of resources towards it here in the US, and we have millions upon millions of acres of Forest in the US (as does Canada) - most of it under Federal management (not state, so can't put all the blame on California for that for once). No management is still a choice, and that decision could still be construed as mis-management. I won't claim to know what the answer is, but it does depend on your goal, and we will never really agree on what the goal is. A clear-cut forest won't burn, but it isn't a forest any longer. A forest with zero management will do whatever nature wants to do with it, but that may not be in our best interest (as we are witnessing in Canada right now). I don't know what the right answer is there.

Once a wildfire starts, blame doesn't really matter for ~that~ wildfire any longer. It's too late - you must just shift to managing the fire, not the forest. Forest Management is only pertinent in preventing the ~next~ fire. Standing by and watching it burn while tossing blame around is just as bad as the mis-management that got you there in the first place.

 

[Notmattwong]

There is truth here.

The forests are changing. I live inside the borders of the Sierra National Forest, and have lived either in or on the border of the forest for around 20 years. Even in just that short 20 year span I can spout off a handful of things that have changed.

Now - some change is normal; nothing stays static, including forests. If this change is "normal", I can't say. It doesn't follow any pattern from my lifetime, nor those who have lived around here longer than me. It doesn't seem to follow any meteorological pattern from since we started recording such things. But that doesn't mean there may not be a longer cycle we just can't see from our narrow slice of time. And I won't deny, it very well could be human-induced; we will never have a zero-footprint, and we are a part of nature and will impact it just as much as the trees and the wildlife (we are just semi-cognizant that we are doing so).

Wildfires today are more violent than any in living memory. Fires big enough to have their own weather patterns. I can recall seeing the fire tornado as it swept over the San Joaquin River toward Mammoth Pools from the Creek Fire back in 2020 - that went right through a very popular OHV area -- including Coyote Lake, which we just had a trip report from recently, and the famous Ducy-Ershim Trail. The burn scars are still all around that area (and will be for decades). And it got within 7 miles of my home.

Maybe hundreds or thousands of years ago they cycled like this, I can't say. But it's scary as hell watching one bear down on you or your home. I've just resigned that one day my house will probably be involved in a wildfire; it's only stuff, and as long as my family and I can get out alive, we can rebuild or relocate.

As far as mis-management goes. There are definitely things that could be done better there. We put a pitiful amount of resources towards it here in the US, and we have millions upon millions of acres of Forest in the US (as does Canada) - most of it under Federal management (not state, so can't put all the blame on California for that for once). No management is still a choice, and that decision could still be construed as mis-management. I won't claim to know what the answer is, but it does depend on your goal, and we will never really agree on what the goal is. A clear-cut forest won't burn, but it isn't a forest any longer. A forest with zero management will do whatever nature wants to do with it, but that may not be in our best interest (as we are witnessing in Canada right now). I don't know what the right answer is there.

Once a wildfire starts, blame doesn't really matter for ~that~ wildfire any longer. It's too late - you must just shift to managing the fire, not the forest. Forest Management is only pertinent in preventing the ~next~ fire. Standing by and watching it burn while tossing blame around is just as bad as the mis-management that got you there in the first place.

So refreshing to see well-written, and thoughtful posts other than “California bad!”

 

[EasternSierra]

There is truth here.

The forests are changing. I live inside the borders of the Sierra National Forest, and have lived either in or on the border of the forest for around 20 years. Even in just that short 20 year span I can spout off a handful of things that have changed.

Now - some change is normal; nothing stays static, including forests. If this change is "normal", I can't say. It doesn't follow any pattern from my lifetime, nor those who have lived around here longer than me. It doesn't seem to follow any meteorological pattern from since we started recording such things. But that doesn't mean there may not be a longer cycle we just can't see from our narrow slice of time. And I won't deny, it very well could be human-induced; we will never have a zero-footprint, and we are a part of nature and will impact it just as much as the trees and the wildlife (we are just semi-cognizant that we are doing so).

Wildfires today are more violent than any in living memory. Fires big enough to have their own weather patterns. I can recall seeing the fire tornado as it swept over the San Joaquin River toward Mammoth Pools from the Creek Fire back in 2020 - that went right through a very popular OHV area -- including Coyote Lake, which we just had a trip report from recently, and the famous Ducy-Ershim Trail. The burn scars are still all around that area (and will be for decades). And it got within 7 miles of my home.

Maybe hundreds or thousands of years ago they cycled like this, I can't say. But it's scary as hell watching one bear down on you or your home. I've just resigned that one day my house will probably be involved in a wildfire; it's only stuff, and as long as my family and I can get out alive, we can rebuild or relocate.

As far as mis-management goes. There are definitely things that could be done better there. We put a pitiful amount of resources towards it here in the US, and we have millions upon millions of acres of Forest in the US (as does Canada) - most of it under Federal management (not state, so can't put all the blame on California for that for once). No management is still a choice, and that decision could still be construed as mis-management. I won't claim to know what the answer is, but it does depend on your goal, and we will never really agree on what the goal is. A clear-cut forest won't burn, but it isn't a forest any longer. A forest with zero management will do whatever nature wants to do with it, but that may not be in our best interest (as we are witnessing in Canada right now). I don't know what the right answer is there.

Once a wildfire starts, blame doesn't really matter for ~that~ wildfire any longer. It's too late - you must just shift to managing the fire, not the forest. Forest Management is only pertinent in preventing the ~next~ fire. Standing by and watching it burn while tossing blame around is just as bad as the mis-management that got you there in the first place.

The difference in Canada is that the burning forests there are largely boreal forests. These are made to burn to the ground on the rare occasion that they burn. No forest management is going to keep extensive fires out of boreal forests because the trees have very little resistance to fire. "Raking the forest" or clearing out brush doesn't do the trick in those forests. Historically they'd burn once in a century or three in an extreme dry spell. Now the fires are happening at a greatly accelerated rate.

Fire ecology and forest management are complicated, and contrary to a lot of ill-informed blather out there, there's no one-size-fits-all solution for all forests. In the western U.S. (even in the same county or national forest) you can have very different forests with very different ecological relationships with fire, as well as very different responses to any particular kind of management. It's complicated, but that doesn't fit anyone's convenient narrative.

 

[Brian_B]

The difference in Canada is that the burning forests there are largely boreal forests. These are made to burn to the ground on the rare occasion that they burn. No forest management is going to keep extensive fires out of boreal forests because the trees have very little resistance to fire. "Raking the forest" or clearing out brush doesn't do the trick in those forests. Historically they'd burn once in a century or three in an extreme dry spell. Now the fires are happening at a greatly accelerated rate.

Fire ecology and forest management are complicated, and contrary to a lot of ill-informed blather out there, there's no one-size-fits-all solution for all forests. In the western U.S. (even in the same county or national forest) you can have very different forests with very different ecological relationships with fire, as well as very different responses to any particular kind of management. It's complicated, but that doesn't fit anyone's convenient narrative.

I'm not disagreeing with you at all.

 

[T800]

Hopefully I won't need tires for a few more years. Though I never mind an excuse to go to Vegas for the weekend since I'm a poker player.

Part of the problem with wild fires: The fire dept.'s aren't allowed to do enough abatement due to the environmental groups. So fires are worse as a result.

Then you have other idiotic issues. There was a fire in W. LA a few years ago. All of the fire hydrants in the area were empty. I'll try to avoid political arguments... though that was the main problem.

 

[EasternSierra]

Part of the problem with wild fires: The fire dept.'s aren't allowed to do enough abatement due to the environmental groups. So fires are worse as a result.

Common talking point that's not accurate for our U.S. national forests or BLM lands.

Traditional forestry on these lands was not geared towards fire risk reduction in most cases. The focus was on getting out the merchantable timber, or else clearcutting the forest then replanting with dense, fire-prone stands of young trees all the same age. This worked for decades, mostly, in the cooler and effectively moister climate of the 20th century. (A warmer climate has a much greater capacity to evaporate water from a landscape.)

If you want to clear out the forest understory you need either periodic controlled fires or prohibitively expensive (for millions of acres of land) manual clearing then burning of debris piles. That doesn't pay economically in any immediate sense, despite its great long-term value. It was never in the budget of our land managing agencies, at least not for millions of acres of land. (There were always small exceptions, and they were exceptions.)

Prescribed burns were pretty much not allowed in most places at most times until the last few decades. As someone who was really concerned about our overgrown western forests back in the early 1970s (when the timber industry was in high gear and had been since WWII), it was extremely disheartening in the following decades to see the very slow adoption of controlled fire to manage forestlands. (This was different on private lands in the southeast which are a whole other story).

Here in California the situation was made worse because the EPA counted pollution from controlled burns against states' pollution performance, while wildfire smoke didn't count. That was only changed a few years ago.

California has a combination of terrain and temperature inversions that's particularly effective at trapping smoke in the valleys where people live, yet we had great trouble in getting controlled burns scaled up enough to make a difference even locally because of this problem. People blamed the state air boards and California politicians, but they were responding to federal directives.

So the popular argument is that we're getting a lot more fires because 'the greens stopped something' that largely wasn't actually happening. It's a diversion from facing the reality of what climate change is doing for our forests.

To echo what Brian stated, wildfire is now doing things it didn't used to to, in a wide range of vegetation types. Listen to the firefighters, not to the talking heads on TV or the politicians.

Closing note: Over 40 years ago one summer, I was running a chainsaw in the woods in Idaho doing forest thinning. This was to thin out excessive tree reproduction to get better growth of saplings, not for fire risk reduction. We left the cut down saplings on the forest floor. At the rate we were going it would have taken us over a century to treat the whole ranger district. In other words, a drop in the bucket, like I saw in so many other forests then and now.

 

[23OBX2.7]

Most of those forests burning are in very remote roadless areas and have never been managed, certainly not back in the previous centuries before there were so many fires there.

The forests there are drying out due to a substantially warming climate in far northern areas. That's why they're burning far more than they used to. I know a lot of people don't want to hear that and will assume the worst about my intelligence. Cue the laughing emojis. I don't care.

Remote areas /99.9 % of the country ( land shortages though), where forestry and forst managment occurs where they gave permits to strip all trees incl about 20% which are natural fire breaks that were never replaced and still not.

Part of the colonial British legacy of strip mining every foreign domain haha

As a low price commodity heavily reliant on tax payer subsidies and cash gifts to keep local prices propped up ridiculously high is all somewhat close to varios small towns and logistics

Big business to fight fire any one with 40 yr old choppers and clapped out pilots can bank huge dollars so much that the old wrecks stay around for heliski....as if Id pay $3K day to step foot in 40 year old chopper LOL....most dont know better

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