Effective Climate Action Demands Ending Wildfires, by Dr. Brien Seeley
Our speaker for Thursday, August 29, 2024, was Dr. Brien Seeley, whose topic was “Effective Climate Action Demands Ending Wildfires.” Brien is an ophthalmologist and long-time advocate for electric aviation. He is the President and founder of the Sustainable Aviation Foundation. He founded the Electric Aircraft Movement in 2007 by organizing and chairing the work’s first-ever electric aircraft conference.
Dr. Seeley’s efforts to promote electric aviation led him to develop the idea for building fleets of ultra-quiet, payload-agnostic electric sky taxis. These sky taxis would be emission free, quiet, have short take-off and landing requirements, the ability to fly out of 3-acre airparks, and provide door-to-door service. A large fleet of these taxis could drastically reduce carbon emissions in the nation’s air and transportation travel services. More recently, as a result of the influx of high-damage wildfires, he became involved in searching for ways to limit wildfire damage by using a fleet of small electric aircraft similar to his sky taxis. Wildfires have become an environmental disaster. 8 of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last 5 years. Global wildfires cause 2.4 times more CO2 emissions than global fossil fuel use! According to Dr. Seeley, wildfires may be the cause of recent extreme weather and fire events. Further, forests destroyed by wildfires take 10-50 years to reach 50% of their CO2 capturing capacity, which severely limits the earth’s ability to effectively capture carbon in the atmosphere.
Dr. Seeley believes that fleets of small autonomous aerial firefighters (AAF) would be more effective than the very large air tankers currently used to fight fires. These are limited for various reasons, including their inability to fly at night or in smokey conditions. Along with an effective early warning and dispatch system, AAFs could almost immediately attack and destroy small fires before they become large fires and thus end the damage caused by wildfires. A brigade of eTankers making nearly continuous drops could completely contain a remote wildfire within about 30 minutes of ignition! If this could be done on a massive scale we could end wildfires, drastically cut CO2, and limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees centigrade. All of this is technically feasible, affordable (compared to the cost of unabated wildfires), and may be the fastest and most effective way to curb the climate crisis. Dr. Seeley believes that unless we can very quickly limit the damage caused by wildfires, the climate crisis will continue to spiral out of control.
Thank you Dr. Seeley for the excellent presentation. Dr. Seeley’s foundation, Sustainable Aviation, can be reviewed at sustainableaviation.org.
Click HERE to view a limited-time recording of Dr. Seeley's presentation.
