Read more: Fire Season in California, When Breathing Feels Like a Luxury The majority of steel plants are now also electric arc furnaces, which are less energy intensive.
Steel can also be a driver of emissions, but 90% of the steel manufactured today is recycled, and it can be recycled endlessly in a way that wood cannot. The Trump administration removed protections from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, one of the largest intact temperate rainforests in the world, as one of his last acts before leaving office. Old-growth trees are still being cut down in what Law calls the “gold coast,” an area of the Pacific Northwest where trees store more carbon, per unit area, than tropical forests. When Elon Musk tweeted in January that he was donating $100 million toward a prize for the best carbon capture technology, one user replied, ‘Congratulations to whoever invents forests.’ Dry conditions are worsened by climate change keeping trees, which absorb carbon dioxide and reduce human emissions, in the ground is one of the most cost-effective ways to slow it. The world’s reliance on timber has a role in the fires that scorched Jennings’ hillside and that burned 8.9 million acres across the American West last year. “It’s the same as getting people off fossil fuels.” Still, it may take awhile, he says-old habits die hard. His workers have traded in hammers and nails for pneumatic tools that fasten together steel panels. Watson started building with non-wood materials last year and now, as he works with clients who lost homes in the 2020 fires, 19 out of 21 rebuilds are using non-wood materials. “Wood is ubiquitous, but it’s time to evolve,” says Matt Watson, the president of Gateway Builders, a Northern California contracting company that has been building homes since 1997.
“Wood houses are just so vulnerable and leaky,” says Jennings, who is building a second house using RSG panels for his mother in Sonoma County, near where the LNU Lightning Complex Fires in 2020 burned 363,000 acres over the course of six weeks. The structure is sturdier, less susceptible to termites, and less flammable than wood, he says. When he’d built it five years earlier, Jennings instead used something called RSG 3-D panels-blocks of foam insulation held inside a steel grid, fastened together, and covered with concrete. Jennings says his house survived the Valley Fire of 2015 because it was not made of wood. Inside, Legos and Christmas decorations were unmelted, and a propane tank behind the house was ¾ full. Its reddish stucco walls and green roof looked startlingly clean perched on the hillside amidst the burnt cars and white ash left in the fire’s wake. The fire consumed the hillside, charring trees and bushes and homes on its way to devastating 70,000 acres in northern California.