LETTER TO THE EDITOR: REDUCING WILDFIRES IN COLORADO

June 29, 2026

Letters to the Editor

Dear Editor:

On June 27, 2026, three federal wildland firefighters died in a burnover on the Snyder Complex, four fires merged across Mesa County into a single 28,000-acre event with zero percent containment.

1. Two additional firefighters were severely burned. At 3:20 that afternoon, NASA satellite data recorded 556 megawatts of Fire Radiative Power at the fire's leading edge, 16 miles west-southwest of my home in Fruita.

2. I monitored the fire through the night with bags packed by the door. This is not abstract policy. It happened here.

There was no burnover death in Colorado's federal wildland fire program in 2023. There was none in 2024. Then, in a single incident in 2026, three people died and two others will carry burns for the rest of their lives. When a trend breaks that sharply, the cause is not a mystery. It is a decision.

Since the onset of federal workforce reductions this year, 26,000 public lands staff have been eliminated, a 17 percent reduction, according to Andrea Delgado, former USFS Deputy Regional Forester.3 Colorado alone lost 350 Forest Service positions. More than 1,400 red-carded firefighters were fired, then recalled weeks before fire season opened, their institutional knowledge and crew cohesion fractured. Hazardous fuels treatment fell 38 percent in 2025, leaving 1.4 million acres untreated that would otherwise have been managed. The proposed FY2027 federal budget cuts Forest Service funding by 75 percent and eliminates wildfire research entirely.4 Officials who authorized those cuts, and who now offer condolences to the families of the dead, should understand that condolence is not accountability.

Beneath all of this is a physics problem that budget cuts made worse but did not create. Atmospheric CO2 is accumulating at 3.1 parts per million per year. At that rate, we reach 450 ppm, the threshold associated with severe and irreversible climate disruption, by mid-2033.5 Higher CO2 means higher temperatures; higher temperatures mean lower fuel moisture; lower fuel moisture means fires burn hotter, spread faster, and resist suppression in ways that kill firefighters. This summer, as three people died in Mesa County, Europe was recording more than 1,300 excess heat deaths, with France alone losing more than 1,000 people in a single week.6 In western Colorado, livestock are being put down for lack of water and farmers cannot plant. These are not separate stories. They are the same story.

I have been writing about climate science since my first op-ed in 1976. I understand what the data says and what it does not say. It does not say that better forest management alone will stop this. Fuels reduction and prescribed burning are necessary, I support accelerating both under state authority, independent of federal capacity. But they address the symptom, not the cause. The carbon already released into the atmosphere does not leave on its own. The only mechanism capable of addressing legacy atmospheric carbon is Direct Atmospheric Carbon Removal, or DACR.

As Colorado's write-in candidate for governor, my platform includes SkyCarbon Enterprise: a state-led DACR infrastructure program funded through carbon market revenues, not general taxation. It pairs with fire-adapted building composites, fireproof, carbon-negative materials deployed at the wildland-urban interface, and a state-level fire resilience framework that does not depend on a functional federal system. None of this is aspirational. It is engineering and finance. It can begin in 2027 if voters demand it.

The three firefighters who died on the Snyder Complex were doing their jobs under conditions that officials at multiple levels of government made measurably more dangerous. The families who are grieving this week deserve more than sympathy from the people responsible. They deserve a governor who will tell the truth about what is happening to this state, and act on it. I am asking voters who agree to write in Christian Komor for Governor of Colorado in November 2026.

Respectfully,

Dr. Christian Komor

Fruita, Colorado

Write-In Candidate, Colorado Governor 2026

1InciWeb / USFS Incident Report, Snyder Complex, June 28, 2026. https://inciweb.wildfire.gov

2NASA FIRMS Fire Radiative Power data, June 27, 2026, 3:20 PM MDT. https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov

3Westwise / Andrea Delgado (former USFS Deputy Regional Forester), public reporting on DOGE-related federal land management workforce reductions, 2025–2026. https://westwise.org

4USFS budget proposal FY2027; Forest Service hazardous fuels treatment reporting, 2025. See also Congressional Research Service analysis of federal wildfire suppression funding.