So essentially the common human nature of being reactive instead of proactive. You'd think with the history of drought and wildfires in California there would be an intelligent policy change in regards to combating these events. This is going to continue as long as they allow it. Geography certainly isn't helping.
Seems the politicians and officials in California care more about social issues like pushing gender neutral pronouns on everyone than they do the infrastructure of the state and well being of their citizens.
Arizona bay anyone?
Yeah, the problem is that controlled burns do cause a good deal of pollution -- probably not as much as a forest fire, but usually the biggest opposition comes from the localities near the controlled fire. As while it is 'controlled' there is sometimes where thing can get out of hand. So the people around them are nervous.
You'd much rather see proactive policies -- look here for a good deal of them https://calmatters.org/explainers/solving-california-wildfires-why-dont-we-do-these-things/
This source explains the pros and cons of common talking points when we're talking about forest fires.
What I'd do if I was Trump is to be sure that batshit crazy moon bats like CA governor and legislators don't get a dime of federal money until they straighten quite a few things out. And until then they need to STFU.
I think this is what should be done. That's the only real way to force change -- saying OKAY if you don't want to do this, then we're going to withold some federal grants for you to schools and such. Boom -- now you have soemthing that can be done.
But CA has no reason to want to do that if they keep getting flooded with federal money and more government when something like this happens.
If you fix the problem once and for all you don't need more and more government agencies and control.
If you let the problem continue, but act like you're fixing things (or fix small issues so it looks like progress) Then you're going to be able to get away with this system.
Hopefully they're forced to fix their issues though.