The case for letting Malibu burn (1995)
longreads.com141 points by pseudolus 12 hours ago
141 points by pseudolus 12 hours ago
>> So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
Why do Floridians keep rebuilding in the wake of endless hurricanes? Why do folks live in Tornado Alley? Why do Dakotans endure one tragic winter after another? Why did New Orleans build back after yhe flooding?
Man seeks to tame nature - to bend it to our will. Plus we'll take "build now, great views now" over "possible disaster later ".
One could argue that nowhere is completely risk free, but it seems like the homing instinct (Plus the cultural instinct to build out of wood) is strong.
It might be time to consider alternate building methods suitable for the risk of the area.
I would append to these explanations, "moral hazard". Many of the people rebuilding in these areas are being subsidized by the rest of us, particularly people with access to reimbursement from the national flood insurance program.
Most of them are also being rebuilt with the same inherent problems. If they were rebuilding after a fire or tornado with concrete or ICF homes, with metal roofs with ember screens and tornado straps that would be okay.
Agreed on this point, I don't want to be subsidizing insurance or paying for multi millionaires homes to be rebuilt.
I truly feel bad for the people who lost their homes, it's awful. But it shouldn't be the tax payer who picks up the tab. If insurance is so prohibitively expensive you can no longer afford to build there, then so be it - you can't afford to live there after all.
> paying for multi millionaires homes
Keep in mind that for many expensive homes, much of the expense is in the location, and not the home itself. It doesn't cost the market value of the house to rebuild it on the same spot. It's also not free, and in mass disasters it can be more because of shortages, but it's still less, often significantly so, than the market value.
The flip side can also be true, where the replacement cost of a home is higher than its market value. Always be sure to insure your home for at least the replacement cost.
This strikes me as not understanding the limits of private insurance. There wouldn’t be earthquake insurance across much of California if the state didn’t provide it. Private insurance isn’t generally able to withstand large calamities which result in many thousands of high dollar claims in a short period of time.
You can insure against a very expensive event that is very likely to happen; it's simply that the premiums for that insurance will be very, very high. If you're "insured" for a catastrophic event that is likely --- for instance, a home in Pacific Palisades of any sort --- and your premiums look reasonable and bearable, then the odds are you're not insured, you're subsidized.
Private insurance can and generally withstands large calamities (known as natcat losses) without government intervention via the utilisation of global reinsurance organizations. Especially for earthquake, a properly reinsured insurance can cover a large earthquake loss about once every 15-20years
Re-insurers also re-calibrate their rates, which may mean private may be effective ... until the first big disaster whereafter the re/insurance premiums become eye-watering.
Sure, the point of insurance is that the many subsidize the few.
But I expect there comes a point where insurance companies say "enough is enough".
Perhaps federal and state money will start to pay out, but the land gets bought as well.
Getting insurance is a making a bet bad stuff happens. The insurer makes a bet it doesn’t happen when it signs an agreement with you. If the bet is obviously negative expected value, it stops being a useful subsidy and it becomes instead throwing good money away.
A rule of thumb is you'll pay twice in insurance premiums than you'll get in payouts. Insurance is only worth buying if you cannot afford the cost of the disaster.
For example, I don't pay for collision protection on my car. I can afford losing the car. Over time I've saved far more in insurance premiums than the cost replacing the car.
The same goes for insurance for appliances, etc.
Yep. One of the ways the rich get richer is when they can self-insure everything and invest what they would have normally paid in premiums.
That really isn’t true. The rich buy insurance like anyone else, they are even more aggressive about insurance with things like umbrella policies to protect their wealth. They also hedge a lot, which is just insuring through investing.
Another way the rich get richer is simply taking their money and investing it.
Can you afford to replace the other guy's car?
Collision insurance != liability insurance.
Also AFAIK collision and total loss is required to get financing and for leases, so you still pay / there is still an opportunity loss in other forms.
I lease EVs with the federal tax credit and invest what I’d otherwise spend buying cash. You need to look very closely at the numbers for your own situations but it’s been a “better” deal than buying cash the past few cycles.
Sure, you could also just buy a decade-old Honda used, but then you get to drive a used decade-old Honda. It’s like suggesting that camping is cheaper than a hotel or that luxury hotels provide no additional value beyond budget hotels.
On the other hand, used Range Rovers depreciate so drastically that you can buy one less than a decade old for under $10k, just make sure to check insurance and maintenance costs and actually have it inspected before buying. The air suspension in particular is why you see so many “dropped” examples for cheap.
Insurance has an obviously negative expected value for its customers.
The magic trick is it protects you from ruin. EV is negative for this one bet but not for the whole budget.
Right; there are all kinds of positive-EV bets you should never take. Heads you win $50,000,000; tails I get $500,000 and your house. Insurance isn't so much about expectation as it is about marginal utility.
The insurance companies did say "enough is enough", which is why the FAIR plans exist - i.e. https://www.cfpnet.com/
Man seeks to tame nature and is getting repeatedly humbled more and more these days, or at least should be
The Gulf coast is thousands of miles and hurricanes only destroy a few dozen miles of it each year. So the risk management isn't illogical.
It seems like the destruction is not rotating through all miles equally though.
It sure seems like the folks in Florida are rebuilding more often than most.
Florida is many hundreds if not thousands of miles of coastline. The vast majority of it hasn’t been impacted majorly (defined as more than a tropical storm and evacuation) in many decades.
My family has been there since the 50s and has never had major damage to any home. There’s some work and minor damage involved with tropical storms but nothing like a full on flood or total loss of house like these fires.
It’s just not true at all to say that most of Florida is regularly majorly impacted.
The devastation of a sparsely-inhabited patch of rural coastline isn't an economic or social problem, because ~nobody lives there. But pick any one of those patches and build a metropolis there, and you've recreated the problem we do care about. It's the concentration of risk that's the issue.
Exactly, and plenty of other Gulf states obviously are devastatingly impacted all the time, e.g Katrina, Harvey, etc. Not sure what the parent comment you are responding to is talking about.
Florida is a huge place. Hurricanes are enormous but the part that does serious damage is pretty small. Most Floridians have been through a hurricane. Few have had to rebuild after one. A major hurricane that hits the state is going to destroy some houses but not a particularly large fraction of all the houses in the state.
Similarly, tornado alley seems tremendously destructive, but the breadth of the destruction is small. The average interval between house-destroying tornadoes at any given point is hundreds if not thousands of years
I think framing people "staying put" in a solely negative light paints an incomplete picture. I'd bet that the biggest reason people stay put is not anti-social but pro-social--tight community, cultural, and family bonds.
That's definitely the case in Altadena which is a historically minority neighborhood. The cities south of Altadena like Pasadena and South Pasadena were redlined by real estate agents for decades after desegregation, which forced African Americans and Latinos to settle the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains at that wildland-urban boundary. Lots of people lost homes that have been in their families since the 60s and 70s.
Who knows? If not for those policies, Pasadena could have been built denser and Altadena could have been miles of flat natural reserve that acts as a large firebreak where firefighters can easily fight the flames before they threaten thousands of structures, with frequent prescribed burns to keep the fuel load down.
That's probably the real kind of conversation we should be having of municipalities easing housing restrictions to build denser and the state buying up large swathes of these wildland adjacent communities to create larger breaks between the hills and the houses.
No doubt. As I said, the homing instinct is strong. We build in risky areas because we've lived there all our lives.
Perhaps we should build different though to mitigate risk. It's not hard to build a fire-proof house. Or one that's flood resistant. Or hurricane proof...
Concrete is nice if you don’t want the whole house to burn down, it’s required in some places. Also, some minimum distance between buildings and regulations about what you can plant in the yard. There are folks who’ll say it’s taking away their freedoms and they’re actually right, it’s just we don’t want to pay for an army firefighters for when their respecting their freedoms puts the neighborhood in danger. (I’ve got nothing against firefighters - but if they aren’t needed as much, they can be not firefighters and contribute in a different way.)
Land in the hills above a major city among trees with a view of the ocean in a place with extremely nice weather year-round will always be valuable.
They will absolutely rebuild. Get in now if you’ve got the cash to buy land there. It might take a decade for the EPA to clean it up like Lahaina, but they will absolutely 100% rebuild there.
One would certainly hope that reconstruction would involve houses with concrete exteriors, or masonry. It would be silly to build a bunch of wood houses. Especially for luxury homes, a concrete shell should only add 1% to the overall cost. And technology exists to build hurricane-proof houses.
Shouldn't this be mandated, if a "natural disaster" destroys a home, to not replace it with a similarly vulnerable structure?
Most of the houses are already stucco which is very fire resistant. The problem is more the attic, roofs, and windows that might break.
California has a more stringent wildlands fire building code. Not sure if they'd apply it to this area too. I've also heard that some insurances have declined fire coverage or charged very high premiums to homes not meeting their material requirements.
i have been wondering about this. how well do concrete and other less flammable materials actually help in a fire storm like this? wouldn't much of the house still get damaged enough that you may well have to rebuild anyways? or is the difference enough to keep, say, 50% of the houses in a reusable state as opposed to losing all of them?
I've been wondering how fire manages to damage a stucco/stone house in the first place, especially in some of the cases where there wasn't much vegetation around. The scale of the fire must be quite immense and counterintuitive to get the outcome seen on news photos/footage.
Is there any place on earth where the weather isn't potentially dangerious at some time?
Very safe in most of Europe. In the UK the only weather that kills people is the cold (pensioners who can't afford heating; I wouldn't say it's exactly natural causes, but it's in the vicinity) and floods, which occasionally kill single digits of people.
There are basically no earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, wildfire, etc. I would imagine a lot of places are like that.
I live in southern Ontario which is mostly like this too. There is occasional flooding but minor compared to other places, and occasional major snowstorms, but the worst natural disaster I can recall in a half century here was an “ice storm” that caused damage that was quite frankly small potatoes compared to hurricanes and earthquakes.
Living next to the Great Lakes also means that regardless of what happens with droughts, we have a supply of fresh water that is virtually limitless. I have to wonder whether the region will start to become more popular with climate refugees. Might Chicago become more of a destination, for example?
I live in Chicago. I grew up in Southern California (Ventura County). Huge wildfire in fall of '93 started in my neighborhood. Then a few months later in '94, got to "ride" the Northridge earthquake. I would love to move back to CA, but haven't because of natural disaster risk. I still have family that lives there, though, and I enjoy going back when I can. The Great Lakes region theoretically is poised to be a /relatively/ safer place in the future as a "climate refuge", all things considered. And the huge amount of fresh water is nice... except... the more I learn about PFAS in the water, the more I realize... no place is perfect. (And if it truly was perfect, I'd probably not be able to afford to live there.) So... I choose snow, cold, and tornado risk over wildfire and earthquakes. Out of all the risks, wildfire risk seems the scariest (okay, maybe second to flooding). Everyone gets to (and has to) choose which risks they're willing to live with.
> Very safe in most of Europe.
Fires in the Mediterranean region are a serious thing. I got evacuated once from our family house once: flames 20 meters high near the house.
The mid-Atlantic US is quite mild in all dimensions of weather. It’s hot in the summer but not at a level where people keep keeling over. It’s sometimes a bit cold in the winter but nothing too bad. Hurricanes are greatly moderated if they make it that far. Thunderstorms don’t build up that much. Tornadoes happen occasionally but never big ones.
Yes there are many. One of the strategies for dealing with the upcoming climate catastrophe has to be to do a sober assessment of its impact and instrument societies to relocate quickly. There is simply no point in trying to rebuild in areas that will be constantly destroyed by natural disasters on a regular cadence.
I can't think of any. Some are less than other but there is always something. Lightning is a common one
I’ve been to places in the Phillipines where everyone expects their house be destroyed and rebuilt, after typhoons, at least 20 times in their lifetimes.
[edit: typos]
https://firststreet.org/ will report climate risk, for a given address. I live in a part of the Bay Area with the following risk factor profile:
1/10 Flood. 1/10 Fire. 1/10 Wind. 7/10 Air. 3/10 Heat.
Seems manageable. Of course, earthquakes are not climate-related.
I don't know, seems incomplete even for climate stuff. It shows some front range locations in CO as having no real risks, but there's no category for hail, which is a regular and very serious climate and weather related problem.
The odds of the UK experiencing 40°c heat in the next 50 years were put at 0.02% a few years ago. It happened the following year.
Those stats are meaningless. 1/10 just means unlikely but the dice could still land that way.
Other than relatively rare ice storms, central KY always seemed to not have super crazy weather.
UK is pretty benign. We occasionally get some mild "extremes" (for us) that people are not prepared for, but nothing major.
Well given that intense heat wave that hit the UK a couple summers ago where the country went from green to brown from space, I’d worry about forest fires
Let's hope it lasts: https://www.ft.com/content/7711109e-0338-43ad-aada-853f058a2...
You mean like, Wisconsin?
Plenty of tornados, cold, or lightning there.
No, Wisconsin doesn't get a lot of tornados. "Lightning" is pretty funny though.
why is that 'instinct' to build out of wood? The instinct is to build wealth, and it's cheaper to build wood than brick.
I find Western European construction standards to be higher than American. European homes feel like they're made out of brick and stone, seem better insulated, and American homes feel like they're wood-framed with giant modular pieces of wood (at least here in the northeast).
London doesn't have earthquakes. Masonry is a death trap.
Exactly. This is the dilemma in LA. Build masonry frame and die in an earthquake. Build wood frame and die in a wildfire. Metal framing with concrete or other nonflammable siding?
The Great Fire of London put a stop to wooden houses in the UK. Maybe the same will happen in California now.
But having seen the pictures from social media of the torrent of embers, maybe a few more homes might have survived but probably not many (unless they concreted their gardens too).
Roofs are the main problem. Usually they get in through an attic vent, or they catch the eaves on fire. They burn from the top down.
One of the ways I like to tame nature is to get other people to pay for my home by making a government insurance plan that pays to rebuild my home if it breaks. In this way I am like a pioneer, taming Malibu with my $3 m home. Wagies need not apply. This is for men in the arena.
> Man seeks to tame nature [citation needed]
This is a shockingly archaic outlook espoused by the outmoded likes of the 17th century's Francis Bacon who posited "Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature", asserting that "the secrets of nature betray themselves more readily when tormented by [science] than when left to their own course."
To tame, conquer, and torment is an abhorrently perverse attitude to hold towards the cradle of our species. It's not the dominant philosophy of humankind, only the ideology of a backwards niche minority that's had some recent success--not unheard of in nature. ;)
More common and contemporary perspectives are based in concepts of interconnectedness, innate affinity, and stewardship rather than ministration.
> So instead of a long-overdue debate about the wisdom of rebuilding and the need to prevent further construction in areas of extreme natural fire danger, public attention was diverted into a discussion of the best methods for clearing vegetation (rototillers or goats?) and making homes fire-resistant.
Does anyone honestly think that debate has any actual chance of hapenning, even now? Malibu and the Pacific Palisades are some of the best real estate in the state if not the country. There’s always going to be someone willing to pay the rising cost of fire insurance and take the risk to live there. Short of the state buying out all the property owners or making that area uninsurable by CalFAIR, people are going to build. Not to mention the political connections they have.
Altadena, on the other hand, was built where and how it was built because of segregationist redlining in Pasadena and South Pasadena. It’s a historically minority neighborhood that was only built so densely with so little fire protection because they couldn’t afford it and the state never gave them much help. It looks like once again our power companies are responsible for starting a destructive conflagration because they siphoned maintenance money to shareholders and executives (many of whom probably live in Malibu or the Palisades). Any state policy that tries to solve the Malibu/Palisades problem is going to disproportionately screw these low income communities that have built out around the edges. I’m betting that entire neighborhood will sell out to real estate developers building apartment complexes that can afford more expensive fire mitigations, destroying a historical community as much as any freeway and opening the door to tenement fires.
This has all happened before and will happen again. I don’t really see a holistic solution that has any chance of passing public scrutiny and working, other than chipping away at the insurance regulator and CalFAIR, which will screw over the most vulnerable and entrench the real estate NIMBYs.
California needs to get rid of its price controls on insurance, so that people building in high risk areas are exposed to the true costs of the risks they are taking, and have appropriate incentives to build to the conditions.
Let’s start with 1978 Prop 13 and end their property tax subsidies though. Go look up how much the owners of these eight-figure properties paid in taxes over the past five decades.
https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/map only has it for the Bay Area, but Zillow and the county tax assessor websites can show for any address — it’s public record.
Here is a screenshot of Pacific Palisades property taxes https://imgur.com/a/1G6pLap
More exploration can be done here https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/#34.04626347956...
I live in the Netherlands. My insurance already doesn't cover a flood (it also doesn't cover war or a nuclear reactor blowing up).
It is the government that picks up the bill in real disasters I suggest everyone reads the fine print on their contracts.
Government doesn't pick up bills, taxpayers do. And it introduces moral hazard when the people engaging in risky behaviors (buying homes in high fire-risk areas) don't bear the costs of those risks.
This creates larger, systemic risks and is simply unfair. Someone in Montana should not have to pay to rebuild homes in California.
No doubt the people in Montana expect help when their own houses burn down though
It's the difference between paying a few hundred dollars a year on your own insurance because it's incredibly unlikely your house burns down, and many thousands a year because your suburb burns down once or twice a decade.
We shouldn't be back stopping the insurance costs for anyone. If they can't pay it, maybe that tells them something about the place they are choosing to live in.
> Government doesn't pick up bills, taxpayers do. [...] Someone in Montana should not have to pay to rebuild homes in California.
Are Montana residents' taxes currently paying for rebuilding homes in California? How does that work - I actually don't know but I thought FEMA doesn't rebuilt homes?
> Someone in Montana should not have to pay to rebuild homes in California.
Montana receives way more Federal aid per capita than California. So it's fair to say that Californians shouldn't be paying for road maintenance in Montana.
I agree that Californians should not pay for Montana road maintenance.
Federal taxes pay for interstate highways and many large infrastructure projects in states, so indirectly CA pays for MT roads and vice versa.
> Government doesn't pick up bills, taxpayers do.
Is this an interesting comment to make? Yeah... the tax payers foot the bill because like we elect the representatives to maintain the government.
> Someone in Montana should not have to pay to rebuild homes in California.
Is this a joke? Should I, as a Californian, also be able to say "oh, my tax money? You damn well not send it to Montana to help subside program XYZ that doesn't help me."
Yes, you as a Californian should not have to pay for Montana state programs/subsidies.
How can there be price controls on insurance? The state subsidizes insurance in these areas?
The California Department of Insurance regulates the insurance rates, down to how much they can raise them each year. Over the last decade the real risk of these fires has become better known to insurance companies and they've been screaming to be allowed to raise rates faster. Some have even exited the state completely (to new sign ups).
CalFAIR is the state insurer of last resort but last I checked it's not subsidized. There were talks of needing a possible bailout last year, and it's going to intensify now, but it hasn't happened yet.
CalFAIR is subsidized in the sense that insurance companies are forced to pay into it. Insurers of course pass this cost on to their customers. Combined with price controls on insurance this is just taxation with extra steps.
Yeah, the solution isn’t divorcing risk (as communicated by cost) from reality. If the concern is usurious insurance rates, that’s where things like profit caps and other regulations come in. Society should want people to have fair insurance rates but not necessarily cheap rates.
Shouldn't competition take care of usurious rates in relatively free and working market? That is people will move to cheaper offerings which likely are close to real price.
In a market with high uncertainty, more companies are likely to abandon it than hope that their actuaries get the numbers exactly right.
Profit caps are a bad idea in general, but they are an especially terrible fit for companies insuring against tail risks, because you need to eke out a small profit for years or decades to hedge against the black swans with massive costs. The 2017 and 2018 wildfires wiped out _25 years_ of insurance company profits, for example: if you had said in 2013, "hey, these guys have made 20 straight years of profits, we need caps to control costs", you'd have left them insolvent against the fires.
This is all a moot point though: you cannot force companies to offer insurance. If regulations prevent them from offering policies at a profit, they just leave. Which is exactly what is happening in California (and Florida): every company is bailing out and refusing to renew policies.
It’s all in the nuance. Currently the insurance companies have too much moral hazard, as they are able to extract profits during the “good” years (like AllState’s recent $3B stock buyback) and then deny or default during disasters. An extractive profit cap could allow companies to take in more than they spent and save it to prepare for major catastrophes. They wouldn’t have to simply disperse these funds back to policy holders or something. I’m sure that idea would need more refinement, but my overall point was that our regulations should directly target the incentives we actually care about. And we have to rely more on regulation in these situations because the market can’t properly price the risk of companies disappearing during major payout events.
I’d really argue that for-profit insurance companies are a bad idea in general, but that’s a higher-level debate. There’s an interesting idea where governments handle all disaster-related insurance handling but are then also able to have a more comprehensive approach to management (though that’d be hard to trust in the current US political climate).
Profit caps are not the same as disallowing profit. They make sure insurance payouts are fair given the insurance premiums. Distributing "profits" back to shareholders to the point that the insurance company cannot honor policies is a disingenuous use of funds for an insurance company. You seem to think profit cap = no profit, which is not the case. It means the profit ROI cannot take precedence over the insured ROI.
Profit caps in general are a bad idea, and should only be considered in a near complete absence of competition.
In insurance the problem is even worse, because you can’t compute what a reasonable profit cap is. Because of tail risks, you often see insurance companies making a profit of $1b each year for 30 years, then suffering a loss of $40b. Looked at during the typical year you might conclude the profits are excessive, but over a long term it might become apparent that the average profit is actually zero or even negative.
As is often the case, more competition and better competition policy is the solution.
Except they end up paying most of that out in stock buybacks and dividends each year, then the state has to bale them out for tens of billion after 40 years anyway, either directly by taking on the liabilities or by bailing out the homeowners after the insurance company goes bankrupt.
Insurance is an industry with great cashflow. They should be able to keep any profits they make off of investing the premiums, but not the premiums themselves. The incentives just do not line up, they siphon off the money and scream about over regulation before they need to get bailed out.
> The 2017 and 2018 wildfires wiped out _25 years_ of insurance company profits
Money spent to repay loans or to make reserves are not profits.
Really hard to make the argument for this politically when the state is also facing a housing crisis. Unfortunately, a lot of undeveloped land is also prone to wildfire. The solution is zoning relaxation and building dense but there's also a lot of resistance to that.
Newsom is proposing waiving CEQA for rebuilding destroyed homes in the wildfire zone, but only for low-density structures, which makes me want to scream until my throat bleeds. California infallibly manages to zero in on the worst possible solution; waive CEQA either entirely or not at all, and let the Palisades homeowners wait for their decade of environmental review like the rest of us have to.
I think CEQA only applies if you aren't building a similarly sized/footprinted structure, which seems reasonable enough. So I don't see why it would need to be explicitly waived, except to give people with the means to to rebuild bigger/etc.
What fire mitigations are there for these kind of disasters besides complete depopulation? There are already 15k firefighters working on this one. It's just gonna get worse with climate change.
I think that assumption is inaccurate:
1. In parts of the Pacific Palisades/Malibu, as the article points out, yes, there are firestorms that are going to happen there pretty much inevitably. But even then, if you look at some places that had both the money and motivation to really invest in fire prevention (e.g. the Getty Villa), they escaped the worst of the damage - no structures in the Getty Villa, smack dab in the middle of the Palisades, burned.
2. What happened in Altadena was entirely different. It shouldn't go unnoticed that in many pictures and videos that lots of trees are still standing unscathed while the homes are all burnt to the ground. Most of these homes went up long before adequate fire protection was deemed a necessity, and given land values there now (even with it being in the state it's in), it should be possible to rebuild in a much more fire resistant state than what existed previously.
It will get worse no matter what. Even if we went carbon-negative tomorrow, California in currently in a historically wet period. The music will stop no matter what, unless we acquire planetary weather control.
> Across the Californian region, paleoclimate records dating back more than 1,000 years show more significant dry periods compared to the latest century. Ancient data reveals two mega-droughts that endured for well over a century, one lasting 220 years and one for 140 years. The 20th century was fraught with numerous droughts, yet this era could be considered relatively "wet" compared against an expansive 3,500 year history. In recent times, droughts lasting five to 10 years have raised concern, but are not anomalous. Rather, decade long droughts are an ordinary feature of the state's innate climate. Based on scientific evidence, dry spells as severe as the mega-droughts detected from the distant past are likely to recur, even in absence of anthropogenic climate change.
I say this because people should not confuse the issues. Fighting climate change won't stop California from burning. This was always going to happen; even in the best-case massively carbon-negative future, we at best defer the burning a few years. So we shouldn't have the attitude "California will just be OK if we can go carbon negative." It won't.
It's the water that allows the fuel build up though.
So a drier California might actually not burn as much, because, as the article points out, there's not much to burn in a desert ?
Also, this being more about human behavior, people might be much less interested to build in a desert (in this case, I doubt it, see also : Saudi Arabia). (Up to a point of course, worst case climate change scenarios involving these latitudes becoming uninhabitable in the next centuries.)
Otherwise, I was wondering whether, under a still "wet" California, but under still mild climate change, the more frequent both rains and droughts, might increase the frequency of firestorms just high enough so that humans actually start taking them seriously.
(EDIT : And looks like they already did, if those 2007 building code changes aren't just for show ? How is the correlation between the post-2007 buildings and those that survived firestorms?)
Simplest answer is cut down all the trees and pave it over. No fuel no fire.
As politics follows power, I agree that preventing rebuilding would prove challenging. But so is witnessing an apocalypse, the likes of which Angelinos have just endured. It would be a brave politician indeed to remove any possibility of development in those areas.
It certainly feels like the need for climate change adaptation that's been foretold for years is starting to happen. There’s quite a bit of blame being thrown around regarding details like how much water was in the reservoir and the DEI stance of the fire chief, but does any of that really provide a sustainable solution?
Maybe it’s time to confront the fact that people can’t continue to live in those areas without substantial changes in the build environment.
The tragic reality of climate change is that despite well informed and well meaning people, no one actually wants to meaningfully change their own lifestyle to adjust to the consequences. Clear cutting trees for instance, can be a preventative measure, but I'm sure home owners in the area would protest the environmental impact, the loss of privacy, the change in their lifestyle.
California has always been a state that, on paper, acknowledges the severity of climate change, but thus far, has been fighting tooth and nail to keep homes in wildfire prone areas. What I worry about is that California chooses to create a public option for homeowners insurance that is tax payer funded to subsidize at risk homes, increasing costs for everyone else. To me this would just be another form of climate change denial.
I'm from a swing state, where you get used to smart people having conflicting opinions.
The people I know who don't embrace climate fear, recycling, etc. always cite hypocrisy as their most salient motivation. They see people like Al Gore and Leo di Caprio talking a big game about a climate catastrophy and then using as much energy as a whole village. They see their friends nitpick composting and then buy single MPG trucks to go camping in. They see cities rolling out fines for recycling badly and then everything going into the same truck when the garbagemen come by.
I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about. By being loudly critical of others without changing their own behavior, they give denialism space to entrench.
"It can't be that bad if even the people who are mad don't seem to actually care."
They’ll say that but it’s a rationalization, not a reason. They’re starting from “climate change is BS” and figuring out a reason for it. If it’s not this so-called hypocrisy then it’ll be something else.
People do need to understand that it’s not hypocritical to say there’s a need for a systemic change, and not live as if the change had already occurred. If the ship is headed for an iceberg, it’s not hypocritical of me to argue that the ship needs to be turned, while not also going out on the front and blowing to the side to add some insignificant turning force.
But if they understood that, they’d probably have enough systems-level thinking to realize that climate change is real and an actual problem.
True, but the relevance or importance of a message is orthogonal to the hypocrisy of the messenger.
Citing the hypocrisy of some messengers as a reason not to care or do anything just means someone really wants an excuse not to care or do anything anyway.
Everybody waiting for a critical mass of other people to tackle something is a good way to not tackle it.
Just talking generally here, not specifically about the climate.
> "Citing the hypocrisy of some messengers as a reason not to care or do anything just means someone really wants an excuse not to care or do anything anyway."
This is not quite the perspective. The issue is that if humans were to shift the climate in a targeted action, it would require an absolutely massive and concerted global effort - something's not only unlike anything else that's ever happened in history, but whose feasibility is strongly contradicted by just about everything in history, and present.
So when even the people that claim to care more than anything else about climate can't really be bothered to live these efforts, what are the chances of people who don't care, are antagonistic, and then let alone with geopolitics entering the picture - actually acting? The answer is, realistically, zero, which means it's necessary to look for different solutions. It's not an excuse to not care, but rather strongly suggestive that caring, in the ways proposed, is not going to be effective.
You know some weird analogy is that it's like teaching kids about sexual abstinence as opposed to teaching them how to use a condom. The first is what you want and it feels good and morally upstanding to go that route, but it's also just not realistic. The latter feels questionable and like it may even be encouraging undesired behavior, but it's also realistic about what's going to happen anyhow.
If the only people we can find who are 'mad' are al gore and leo dicaprio, I'd suggest we have a selection problem. There are plenty of monks, ascetics, lawyers, product managers, entrepreneurs, bankers and trad wives who care and are doing quite a lot more than the average person.
Bad actors, uncommitted actors does not actually change the problem's existence. In an adjacent example consider here in LA. Before the fires, corruption in the homes for the homeless got some decent air. It does not actually change the need for homes for the homeless. Its been poorly implemented and allowed to be exploited. That doesn't mean the homeless should get shafted.
Here the question is quite literally about humanity. If one cannot connect with that, maybe they can connect with the need for a stable population that creates new workers and funds said person's retirement.
What is being preached about is that the way things are going will lead to larger, more unpredicted/out of cycle natural disasters. We are seeing that. Globally. We will all pay, whether its together and preventatively or independently one by one. History shows we do better when we're together.
> I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about.
The ones who do that probably don’t care about their cause so much as having a cause.
Ah, the millennia old argument of "you cannot successfully proselytize donating money to the poor unless you live like a monk yourself".
I am very in favor of climate change mitigations through careful legislation and believe we are doing nowhere near enough. But I think a closer analogy is "proselytizing donating money without donating any money yourself" or in the extreme of making the problem worse -- "proselytizing donating money while robbing from the poor." That proselytizing while making the problem worse is more a problem with the proselytizer than the critic. But the worst of all is making it worse and actively fighting against remediation.
More like the decades old argument that if you keep getting caught fucking men in toilet stalls being gay can't be all that bad.
Is...that a decades old argument? Or is the argument: If you're fucking men in toilet stalls, stop arresting other men for doing the same and claiming no one should do that. AKA the rule of law.
Eh, as someone who’s been vegan for a couple decades, ascetic for a solid chunk of that time, and active in various other ways to greater or lesser degrees, people will still shut down mentally when they don’t have the hypocrisy lever to pull.
People in the reactionary/denialist/antagonistic camp will just end with “okay yeah you’re right but I’m not changing/I don’t actually care/I accept that I do evil and shrug”.
People looking to inspire positive change being required to be perfect saints lest they and their movements be condemned seems like a hint that human psychology is not tuned to rise to this occasion.
That expectation of perfection is unrealistic. Humans are messy and bound to be hypocritical in countless ways.
The CEO of Phillip Morris may volunteer at the local children’s hospital and feed the homeless on weekends.
Yet his hypocrisy in doing good in his personal life while doing so much harm in his professional life doesn’t seem to interfere with his ability to do harm, in fact it likely helps.
The executive director of the nonprofit children’s hospital going out on weekends and beating stray dogs to death with a pipe, well his hypocrisy may very well end his ability to do good in his personal life.
It seems like we’re just destined to let people who do bad things without any pretense of doing good off the hook, while crucifying anyone who dares try to do a moral good who isn’t somehow perfectly aligned in their lifestyle, ideology, and entire life history. Despite the fact that the former may represent a large net negative to our world and the latter may represent a net positive.
TLDR: Even if the climate activists weren’t hypocrites, your friends would likely be no closer to embracing the terrible reality of climate change and the necessity of painful sacrifice to address it.
Perfectly put. Personally I am quite amazed at people who think this way. This is not adult level reasoning. It’s not something that will change by setting an example.
I just fear that large swathes of society are completely oblivious to what it means to live in a liberal civil society and how changes gets affected. The expectation of perfection seems like a result of being unfamiliar/unrealistic.
Historically, we do have examples of it working though :
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-chr...
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-early-christian-strateg...
Though in our case it's a much harder issue :
How do you make and keep a powerful polity while staying militarily weak ? (Tanks / planes / nukes not being an option in a society that decided to de-industrialize.)
This also involves population : a post-industrial society, is likely to have its military strength based on population (like pre-industrial societies did, where agriculturalists overwhelmed hunter-gatherers) : how do you keep your population low without becoming weak ?
(Christian polities didn't exactly stay meek, more like the opposite (after a while)...)
At least values can be transmitted memetically, without genetical lineage, so keeping a stable national population is probably the least unworkable issue as long as immigration and assimilation are high enough...
I nitpick about little things like accuracy in scientific studies (hear: blatant bias, even admitted by the authors), and only one side of the opinion being funded for studies and not the others.
I myself used to be a staunch vegan, surrounded by friends who planned not to have kids. Well, they have kids now. That triggered my will to study the original documents and find a movement that is fundamentally dishonest.
The worst angst I have is, what if they were dishonest and still right. That would be terrible.
Zoom out:
>But in gauging the longer-term trend of what’s really happening with the fires, it’s necessary to go back much further. Data derived from written records from Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service dating back to 1919 show that wildfires, far from increasing, have actually declined over the last 100 years. And in fact the website of the National Interagency Fire Center previously noted that fires were at their very worst a century ago. (See data, research, and methodology for this article.)
>The data on the overall, century-long trend suggest that most of the 20th century represented an unusually low amount of fire, and what we’re seeing now is a return to the “normal” levels of fire of the early 1900s.
https://future.com/why-california-burns-the-facts-behind-the...
Thanks for that link. The data also shows that, over a longer (millennia) timescale, California is currently in a wet period.
Context is very important. Climate change is a critical issue, but solving it doesn't help California stop burning.
California leaving a wet period will make it burn less.
The problem isn't a lack of water. It's that we get a ton of water for a year or two. A bunch of stuff grows. Then we get no water for many years. All that stuff that grew in the wet years dries out. Eventually it burns.
If we just enter a dry period, there is only 1 step: no water, nothing grows. No more fires.
Climate change is real, but people are vastly overstating the magnitude of its effect.
This is simply a fire prone region, and this was inevitably going to occur at some point, with or without climate change.
The government should have been more prepared for that.
This. Fire is an integral part of CA ecosystems and the native plant communities are dependent upon it. It does burn more frequently thanks to man, but citing climate change as a reason for the fires only makes you sound smart to the ill-informed.
Support in CA for rebuilding is really county based. Butte County is fine with you making the same mistake over again.
Sonomas cities are helpful by not rezoning to the fire codes they really should be. Napa is happy to let you keep a camper on your burned site for as long as it takes you to realize how you can’t afford to rebuild to 7A code.
Malibu was marked 7A years back and those folks can afford it.
> The tragic reality of climate change
Oh, please. I am so sick of this being shoved in front of people's faces as an indisputable cause for, well, everything. Might as well bring Odin and Zeus into it as causes...because they are just as valid.
I have lived in the Los Angeles area for nearly 40 years. The Santa Ana winds happen every year, multiple times per year. It never fails. The winds are strong and mostly directionally constant. Some years are worse than others. Average speeds are not monotonically increasing.
Guess what? Strong wind + a small fire + lots of fuel = massive fire.
It's that simple.
So please, pretty please, with sugar on top, stop with the nonsense. This was a case of bad governance, bad decision-making, misplaced priorities, complete lack of preparedness and, yes, some bad luck.
Here's a simple example of that: Why is it that we have to rent firefighting aircraft from Canada every year? Seriously? I understand costs. Well, I look around Los Angeles today and it is easy to call that argument to be criminally demented. We should OWN a large fleet of these planes and have them ready to deploy en-masse as needed. Again, it isn't like these winds surprise us!
Brush and vegetation (fuel) management are crucial. In our neighborhood, a few months ago, we received a notice from the fire department saying they were going to come around and inspect for overgrown vegetation. In this letter they said that the requirement was to not have trees or large bushes/plants within about 6 feet (~2 m) from the property line.
NOBODY CAME!
The inspections were not done at all, or, if they were conducted, they were done at an almost invisible scale. I have always been very responsible about this. I do not have large trees anywhere on my property. We live in a fire hazard zone with serious winds multiple times per year. My entire backyard is non flammable and my back fence is concrete block. My neighbors, on the other hand, they have massive highly flammable trees almost touching the fence we share and covering their entire property. Every other year massive branches break off due to strong winds. I have advised them that, if we ever have a fire, their trees are going to become massive ember manufacturing machines. They either don't understand, don't care or a combination of both. The point is: The fire department could have come around and enforced some kind of a reasonable safety standard. They have not. Ever.
And so, if a massive fire takes out the entire neighborhood, this lack of bad governance is what is going to result in a high cost in property and lives.
This isn't about climate change. That's ridiculous. This is about incompetence and misplaced priorities.
> Guess what? Strong wind + a small fire + lots of fuel = massive fire.
Yes, that's true. Yes, it is always more or less inevitable it these circumstances will happen. Most won't dispute that.
What climate change changes is the frequency. A suburb being wiped out once in 100 years is something we can collectively afford. But now, you have wild fires in the middle of winter. It's not once in 100 years any more.
Probably the best illustration of that is Great Barrier Reef, something in my back yard. People who aren't keen on blaming climate change repeatedly point out the reef has always suffered the setbacks we see now - like bleaching, crown of thorns that killed parts of it off. That's true. But is also true that now, unlike before, the reef is rapidly shrinking, especially in the northern regions where it's hotter, whereas before it wasn't.
The reason is the frequency of these die offs. Before, when a section of the reef was destroyed by something or other, in 10 years it would be recover, growing back. Now these things are happening at 5 year intervals and the interval is growing shorter. The reef is retreating as a consequence. It is no longer viable in the regions it once was.
The same is true for California. Climate change has made the frequency of these disasters increase. Whereas before you could afford to insure against 100 year event, you can't afford to insure against a 10 year event. Ergo, climate change is decreasing the amount of California that is habitable.
> What climate change changes is the frequency.
Where is the data you used to support that claim?
And, what is this "climate change" thing anyway. The climate has been changing since this planet was formed. So, yeah, climate is a part of the reality of living on this planet. And that's news, how?
You see, that's the problem with this issue. Of course climate change is real. Who would dispute that fact? What isn't real is instantly attributing EVERYTHING to climate change. Every fire we ever have in California is instantly attributed to climate change, and this is spoken as indisputable truth that nobody should dare doubt. Like fires materialize out of nowhere due to molecular alchemy caused by climate change. This is pure unadulterated insanity.
When someone says "it's climate change" we are all supposed to kneel down, bow our collective heads and accept it as the truth. Well, I call on Zeus then. Why not? Who is going to dispute that the fires and your reef example were not caused by Zeus being angry at us? Prove me wrong.
You know what was needed to prevent this disaster? Simple:
Water: Reservoirs were EMPTY due to political decisions
Funding: The fire department has been shrinking for many years.
During that time the city has grown.
And, during that time, they have been asking for more funding.
Instead they got budget cuts and less fire stations.
Execution: Companies who hire incompetent people fail.
The same is true of government.
People have been voting for the incompetent, and this is
the result.
Maintenance: The only vegetation control we have is when a wild fire
burns down entire hills. If we don't control the fuel
the results are predictable.
Enforcement: People must be responsible for hardening their property
against fires.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flame...
https://nbcmontana.com/news/nation-world/los-angeles-water-c...
Climate change?
The other day there was an interview with the Chief of the fire department. They printed and displayed, on a table, some thirty different documents (if not more) from the last several years. These documents show how they have been asking for help and got nothing at all.
Climate change?
There's an interview with a guy who saved his home and those of two of his neighbors...using a garden hose. Sure, a bit of luck had to play a part here. However, one thing he said during the interview is endemic to aspects of this event: He said that in the time he spent fighting the fires he never saw a single fire brigade come by to protect any of the surrounding homes. Not one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYQlnHdMqC0
Climate change?
> Climate change has made the frequency of these disasters increase.
And, out of the million other variables driving planetary forces, not a single one plays part on any of these events. It is decreed that it this is due to a single variable, climate change. Time to kneel down and accept it.
We cannot do a damn thing about climate change. Not one thing. The hubris in this religion is incredible. People are walking around talking about this like controlling a planetary scale effect is actually something we can do. It's madness.
I mean, the LA fires this week, when compared to planetary scale, were utterly insignificant in scale. A planetary rounding error. And we had no power when facing such a thing, while, in the same breath, people are saying things like "We have to control climate change!". The only reason we had some control is because the winds stopped for a couple of days.
Have we gone mad?
The planet has always changed, evolved and mutated. And we learned to live on it. It --the planet-- sets the rules. We have to live within them. If things are changing, we adapt. It isn't apocalyptic. It's just change. We can't fix it. Now, that would require Zeus.
> Where is the data you used to support that claim?
NASA ...
* https://science.nasa.gov/earth/natural-disasters/wildfires/s...
* https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/climate-change-pushes-...
* https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2912/satellite-data-record-sho...
And poor land management of course .. but also climate change.
> The planet has always changed, evolved and mutated.
Sure .. it had a molten surface once.
Specifically global climate (not weather) has been stable during the development of agricultural and technological humans.
Now, in the space of the last century, that stable climate is rapidly (relative to past changes) changing as a direct thermodymic result of human activity adding significant insulation to the atmosphere.
This has consequences. These consequences are a direct result of human behaviour.
Many comments seem to be under the impression that we do not know or do not choose to build fire-resistant buildings.
We do know how. It is required by code. Chapter 7 of the IBC code is the specific section. It was adopted in 2007. Most houses in America pre-date 2007 construction. If only comments on the internet had the power to retrofit millions of structures across the country, we'd be set.
https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2018/chapter-7-fire-and...
If I remember correctly, those protections are tailored mostly to interior fires. I believe there are additonal recommendations (not required in code) for homes in fire prone areas.
Edit: when I say not in code, I mean not in the IBC. I think CA has their own code for fire prone areas. I'm not sure if that code only applies to rural areas or not. One would hope that it applies universally and the rebuilding will be done with the fire hardening methods. Insurance might influence reconstruction too.
Chapter 7 addresses both interior and exterior fires. Exterior fires are a danger to buildings everywhere (see: Great Chicago Fire).
Yeah, but the external shit is basically "if it's wood, is it treated with fire retardant". It's not like vinyl siding is great for fires.
Not going to enter into anymore baiting, but no — that is not at all the extent of Chapter 7's protections against external fire.
https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2018/chapter-7-fire-and...
Not baiting. You can compare chapter 7 to the CA wildlands code and see the dramatic difference in fire prevention. As others have pointed out, the newer construction made under the code you are referencing are still burning to ground.
Plenty of newer buildings in Altadena also burned just as easily. One of the high end assisted living facilities that was built in the last five years is almost completely gone and they could afford a lot more fire mitigation than the individual home owners.
Surely the problem here is one of policy and political will. In terms of cost I can't imagine that the damage done by unplanned firestorms leveling cities is less than retrofitting or controlled burns.
It is never really that simple. Here is a thought experiment:
How does the idea of defensible space work if your neighbor's walls are 5 feet from your walls? What happens when an entire neighborhood is that closely spaced? How do you retrofit the space between buildings?
There are dozens of challenges like the above, and a lot of them delve into personal freedoms. Should you be able to choose what trees to plant on your property? Should you be allowed a shed? Should the government use air surveillance to enforce the cleanliness of your backyard?
There's lots we can do, lots we should do, but it is far from a simple path with a singular solution.
Townhouses with no intervening space would likely be an improvement. Browse Altadena in streetview and you'll see loads of houses with vegetation -- tinder -- stacked between them. Getting rid of those intervening spaces entirely would reduce the surface area exposed to embers while simultaneously depriving homeowners the temptation to store fuel in unwise places.
Didn't that vegetation actually end up less flammable than the houses ? (Or was that just cherry picking by journalists ?)
Legislating the lessons most medieval cities learnt in dark ages only in 2007 is still wild.
Fire suppression and lack of controlled burns leads to big fires. However in an environment with hot Santa Ana Winds, even with good forest land fuel management, a city like Pacific Palisades as it stood could conceivably burn from an accidental fire within the city.
The real question is this: do we have the capability to build a house that would not burn down if the neighboring house caught fire? If so, a city could be build that would be impervious to wild fire, arson, and accidental fires.
How much would this cost?
Defensible housing exists, there have been some viral photos of a few houses that survived this wildfire. But the embers from large fires can fly for miles in high wind, so it would likely have to be the whole city
Probably a more pertinent question would be: can you construct houses that would not burn in a Santa Ana if all the vegetation and landscaping nearby burned.
If you have fire resistant structures and only vegetation burned, not any structures, it would be much less expensive to replace just the landscaping plants.
In a 80 mph wind, it would be very challenging to design a structure that would survive a wooden house burning next door.
Technically, but nothing miles away caught on fire. The ignition zone is likely only a few hundred yards even in intense Santa Ana winds. So that means only homes in fire prone areas (or adjacent) would need to be made very defensible.
"Technically, but nothing miles away caught on fire. The ignition zone is likely only a few hundred yards even in intense Santa Ana winds."
Not true. Here in Riverside we were watching large still-lit embers floating in (some which caused a repeat fire in the riverbottoms north of the 60, first called Brown then called Holly.) The primary stopping zone currently is around Pomona but another hard uptick in wind and it can easily cover out to the badlands.
These winds are absolutely insane, you just do not understand. When they were peaking on Wednesday morning, my Subaru was being blown almost out of lane while driving down the 91 to work.
Also, older homes that are not up to date with the latest defensible technologies.
Does anyone know if the insurance companies gave discounts to houses that had fire resistant improvements, in the areas that burned in these fires?
Can’t speak for every insurer but CalFAIR does. There’s been a large push to have homeowners install those improvements over the last five years but they’re relatively minor like clearing brush around the house and installing vulcan vents. They don’t give a big enough discount to justify the expensive improvements that would really help in this Altadena fire like installing concrete tile roof, stucco exterior, or an exterior sprinkler systems. That kind of retrofit would probably cost at least $100k for an old house like most of the ones up there. The minor measures don’t help in a freak event like these Santa Ana winds.
I can build you a fire proof house; however, you almost certainly do not want to live in it. It will be uncomfortable and unsightly. Avoiding disaster at all costs is not the reason we build cities or invest in homes.
The better question is, do we have the capacity to build a _city_, that would limit spreading fire damage even if one of it's neighborhoods completely lit on fire?
That will cost a lot less and still be a beautiful place to live.
I always hear about how the region is evolved for the occasional wildfire, but the area also had far more large grazers keeping the fuel in check. The under-grazing is a big part of the fire equation.
Maybe to a small degree. Grazers might keep the non native grasses and invasive weeds in check (although that has historically been the job of wildfires). Grazers aren't going to eat mature oaks, toyon and other woody natives though. The canyons near me have plenty of deer but the canyon is still overgrown and full of fuel.
that's an interesting view. would a feral goats, sheep or another species population keep this specific vegetation down?
My comment is off-topic, but I am unclear what insurance would pay in the case of a total loss of a home/neighborhood. For example, a small one bedroom home in the Pacific Palisades might have had a FMV of $2M. Let's assume the structure itself has a replacement value of $150k. On a typical policy, would insurance pay $2M in case of total loss, or $150k ? What if the neighborhood is destroyed and that land is now worth ~10% of what it was prior ? Would insurance then pay out closer to the $2M ?
Insurance is not going to cover the value of the land, except perhaps to the extent there are expenses related to making it suitable for rebuilding. If the land loses 90% of its value, that’s yours to absorb.
I’m sure it is possible to get coverage that would help you in this case but that goes beyond a standard home insurance policy.
I live on a fault line, and we have overcome most issues by building seismic tolerant buildings. We have the knowledge to live in high-risk areas with some certainty, but it will never be without risk. Climate change, ie more frequent severe weather events, is definitely going to challenge our norms and how we do things. Fire tolerant buildings ?
The big, open question right now is how much of the California wildfires is due to climate change and how much is due to aggressive fire suppression over the pas 50+ years.
Is it an open question? This is an article from 1995 about how massive city-razing fires are endemic to the region and have been for decades. Decades later, it continues to be right. What does it matter whether the fires are monocausal?
You're using arguments appropriate to other ecosystems.
Please familiarize yourself with coastal sage scrub communities in so cal.
is that really that relevant? according to the climate change people this is just going to keep happening, and not just in California but in Washington and Oregon and across Canada and who knows how many other places. This on top of larger storm surges, heat waves, flooding, drought, heating and acidification of the seas, loss of sea ice, etc. All things that we have empirical evidence for.
It only makes sense to stress this question if you reject that premise entirely, and think that if we just get California to to better managing its underbrush, then this whole thing goes away.
otherwise the causality is a bit moot? except maybe it opens the discussion about how much we can afford to spend to clear brush given that this is going to keep being a problem.
They'll need to manage the underbrush better, regardless of how much of an effect was due to climate change. People are going to live there and need to take protective measures. Climate change only increases the amount of management required.
Related, RIP Mike Davis, author of this article. Highly recommend reading some of his books, my favorite being Late Victorian Holocausts which discusses famine in relation to colonialism.
A lot of informative historical detail in this article, but the title is pretty much completely disconnected from the content of the text.
There is almost no discussion of why, or how, letting natural fire processes go unchecked would help the situation.
It may very well be the case that this would be a good idea (or not), but this article really doesn't talk much about it in any case.
But still, some detailed historical context of fires in LA...
I hope they only hook the taxpayers for the actual cost to rebuild and not the stupid crazy valuations that are not linked to any real costs.
Are you talking about houses? Wouldn't insurance cover those, not taxpayers?
There’s going to be lots of cleanup that will be paid for by city and state governments because it’s shared infrastructure and they don’t want to leave cleanup of toxic materials to homeowners that might skimp on it so it washes into the sewer system next time it rains.
It also depends on how many houses were insured by the state insurer CalFAIR. It’s over half a century old and has never been bailed out (funded entirely by premiums) but this is the most destructive fire in Calfironia history so we’ll see how well that holds up to this stress test.
Calfair will certainly need to be bailed out. The plans has over 5B in exposure in palisades alone, and only a few hundred million in reserves.
Insurance in very high risk areas practically cannot exist without governmental subsidies.
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So you think climate change is a hoax? Would love to hear more about this take.
Climate change is not relavant when taking about an area prone to fires for all of recorded history. Blaning climate change just makes you look stupid.
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> Today our horticultural firebreaks are gone, strawberry fields are now aging suburbs, and the quest for beach fronts, mountain view lots and big trees has created fire hazards that were once unimaginable.
Being posted in a tech community with an ideology of constant improvement, I’m positive there will be a preponderance of solutioning in response. I grew very tired of the repetitive nature of the writing. I also noticed amongst its supposed specificity, none of the actual causes of the fires were given. For example, I recall the fire that burned part of Redding was from multiple fires burning together caused by both arson and a trailer chain left dragging against the pavement. I think some of use are aware of the arsonists caught in the current LA county fires. We can point to failures of leadership and forest management. But the author calls the behavior of mankind believing we can tame nature perverse. What a disappointing perspective. Were that true then we have no business ever exploring space, the ocean, or housing anyone for any reason on the Earth’s polar ice caps. The fact is we can and do tame nature in many MANY ways. Anyone that drives a car can understand this. So it’s not a matter of whether we do or not, but to what extent are we trying. That is not a perverse belief, as I’m sure you may know of will read in other replies. We, or those in leadership positions, know what can be done to mitigate destruction and loss of life. The challenge is, and as the history in this article suggests, is doing it.
This comment is kind of deliberately missing the point. We can tame nature, but not to an arbitrary degree: to do so, we need to make compromises and mandate+forbid certain behaviors.
Wildfires can be tamed, but it requires 1) controlled burns which aren't held up for years in red tape, 2) insurance priced appropriately to risk, which means not everyone who wants to live in a fire zone should be able to afford it and 3) construction codes with mandatory firebreaks, specific fire-resistant materials and vigorous enforcement punishing anyone not doing these (since one break in the firewall can lead to the whole town burning down). California refuses to do any of these things, never mind all of them, and pays the inevitable consequences.