Fire season is upon us. This new transit technology can give California the upper hand

San Francisco Chronicle​

14-07-2025

California fire season is officially upon us.
As of Sunday, the Madre Fire in San Luis Obispo County has burned nearly 81,000 acres and injured one firefighter.
Thankfully, technology is opening new paths for putting out wildfires such as this one affordably, safely and with huge cuts to carbon emissions.
Recent advances in aeronautics, satellite and electric vehicle technologies have converged to allow low-cost, quiet, electric, emission-free, pilotless sky taxis to carry people and goods between tiny 3-acre airparks.
Such sky taxis are also capable of effectively fighting wildfires. And they can and should be deployed in California.
A research project I conducted as a senior fellow at UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies for the Sustainable Aviation Foundation, where I serve as president, found that squadrons of sky taxis can be converted to serve as fire-dousing robotic aircraft that I call eTankers. When auto-dispatched, these eTankers would compose a bucket brigade aerial-spray can that could potentially drop 20 times more liquid per hour than our present air tankers.
Each of Cal Fire's human-piloted large air tankers costs about $24 million, and they cannot fly at night or in smoke. Pilotless, electric mass-produced eTankers would cost less and carry no flammable fuel. These eTankers could fly at night in high winds and through heavy smoke while pinpointing their drop locations using their onboard flame-hunting cameras. Arriving on-scene, they could drop their loads of flame-dousing liquid from a low height.
In a UCLA-led study published in the journal Environmental Pollution in October 2022 by authors Michael Jerrett, Amir S. Jina and Miriam E. Marlier found that 'all carbon emission reductions achieved by all California environmental programs between 2003 and 2019 were offset by the carbon dioxide emissions from California wildfires in 2020 alone — by a factor of two.'
The emissions, losses and damages from wildfires recur each year in California, resulting in tens of billions in direct costs. This does not even include the costs of ecosystem damage, horrendous losses of human life, chronic pulmonary diseases, toxic run-offs and air quality degradation.
This could all explain why 2023 and 2024 were the hottest years on record, and why climate models cannot explain the steep rise in global carbon emissions. It could be because the forfeiture of carbon capture due to wildfires accumulates. After a wildfire, it takes over 20 years for a burned forest and four years for burned grasslands to recover 50% of their original photosynthetic capacity. A a result, the loss of carbon capture increases every year.
Fighting wildfires with autonomous aerial firefighting could help turn that around.
But how to pay for such a system? A state fire tax? Parcel tax? Sales tax? A state ballot proposition? Utility surcharges? Bonds?
All likely unpopular.
But Californians are, indirectly, already paying dearly each year for wildfire damage. For example, since 2019, the annual budget for Cal Fire rose from $2 billion to $3.8 billion, and its staffing increased from 5,829 to 10,741.
Yet mega-fires like those earlier this year in Los Angeles County continue to happen. Fire devastation during the past decade has substantially raised insurance premiums for California homeowners by an average of $679 per year. Moreover, the California Public Utilities Commission authorized the three largest utilities in the state to collect an additional $27 billion from 2019 to 2023 for wildfire prevention and insurance costs, which on average added another $572 cost per year, per ratepayer. California homeowners are burdened with an annual cost increase of $1,251 due to wildfires.
Developing a statewide pilotless transit/cargo system could potentially earn significant profits for an operating entity while removing car traffic from our state's gridlocked freeways. Such profit could pay for building and maintaining an autonomous aerial firefighting system that could repurpose sky taxis as eTankers.
By removing fossil-fueled cars from our highways, we could also cut California's annual carbon emissions and save our state billions of dollars by reducing the need to build more roads, rail, tunnels and bridges.
The Global Carbon Project's latest data show continuation of the pathetically insufficient progress in cutting global fossil fuel use. This urgently compels us to find alternative and effective ways to cut emissions.
As a technological remedy for the climate crisis, wildfires, emergency services, surface gridlock, toxic runoffs and untenable infrastructure costs, creating a multifaceted pilotless flight network could reenergize growth and create jobs in California's aerospace and tech sectors, save hundreds of billions of dollars and many lives.
The obvious and urgent need should implore Gov. Gavin Newsom to make this a signature moonshot project for California.