Logging takes the healthiest and largest trees. The ones most likely to survive a fire. While leaving behind all of the fuel. Doesn’t seem like it would help much.

I feel like in a better world we could log the bad ones and make paper or something, but everyone knows the logging would be 100% regulatorily-captured and so no one wants to go this route. :/

Logging increases fire risk in the short term, because it leaves behind a lot of slash fuels and stimulated brushy undergrowth. It is not analogous to a burn.

Could we place some requirements on the logging companies to leave the ground in a certain state? Or would hauling off the undesirable material make logging unprofitable?

You'd likely run into the same problem of politicians and local companies lobbying against such a rule, in the name of "don't hurt businesses" etc.

This needs to change.

Prescribed burns are probably a better tool:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire

Doing prescribed burns outside of the normal fire season allows them to reduce the fuel load and restore more natural conditions without the risk of creating giant runaway fires.

I must admit the log + fire approach sounds tempting: sequestering the carbon (in buildings or, hell, buried logs) sounds too good to pass up.

To be clear the idea isn't logging > fire, but logging just to undue the past mismanagement such that a very loosely controlled burn would be mild and as if the extra stuff hadn't accumulated the past 100 years in the first place. Definitely still need the fire.

They should have been doing this, but California is currently mis-governed.

California is not the problem here. A policy of controlled burns is not tenable anywhere in the United States right now, because we've spent so long fighting wildfires in order to protect the logging industry. The problem is that we've had almost eighty years of Smokey Bear telling people that wildfires are always bad.

It took the catastrophic Yellowstone fires of 1988 to even make the current Yellowstone policy possible. That policy is to allow a naturally caused fire to continue until it threatens humans or buildings, but to stamp out human caused fires with extreme prejudice. This obviously makes no sense -- the forest does not care a bit whether the fire was started by a lightning strike or by a campfire -- but it's the only thing that is politically tenable.

Yellowstone is mostly in Wyoming. It's not a California problem; the problem is a national population that's been misled about what constitutes good forest management. We need controlled burns, building bans in large areas of forest, and judicious use of eminent domain to purchase properties in forest areas so that they can be permitted to burn.

Most of the Californian land in question is owned and managed by the federal government. See eg. this map of land ownership in CA - green, orange, and pink are various federal agencies, while brown is CA state/county lands and yellow is private:

https://ucanr.edu/sites/forestry/California_forests/

Land management in the west is different from the east. On the east coast almost everything is private, then divided up into municipal, county, and state governments. In the West large chunks of land are still owned by the federal government. Private ownership under state authority is only about 40% in CA and less than 20% in NV.

Seriously, California does this https://ssl.arb.ca.gov/pfirs/cb3/cb3.php?id=16

In the middle of a drought it’s mostly too dangerous even in winter. To an extent it’s also a pollution issue.

Much of the forest in CA is managed by the US Forest Service, so you can't blame CA officials for everything. Plus, you can only safely do controlled burns in certain weather windows (not super hot, rain likely coming, etc.). Given we are in the middle of a historic drought, the dry fuel levels are likely much too high to safely start controlled burns.

Almost all of the relevant land is federal.

Logging is only one tool in the big preventative wildfire kit, and is quite difficult if not impossible in many geographic areas.

And controlled burns, like the Aboriginals did in Australia until they were forbidden 10 years ago.

Indigenous cultural burning is now gaining a resurgence in Australia and Canada. It is about time.