I don’t ordinarily write about events “in the moment” but for this I will make an exception, as I was personally affected. Caveats aside, my family and I are safe, we evacuated for several days, and due to heroic efforts by professional firefighters and psychotically brave neighbors, my house and most of my neighborhood escaped destruction. We were the lucky ones – by far. In 2019, as my wife and I were house hunting, we inspected multiple homes in the Pasadena area. Every house we looked at in Altadena burned to the ground last week.

I watched the Eaton fire burn across the face of the San Gabriel mountains from the window of a hotel we found, roaring upwind even against hurricane force winds until, by a twist of fate, around 1 am the winds died down and the fire fizzled out just outside the back doors of my neighbors across the road.

Let’s talk about fire – one of the four classical elements.

A fire requires three things to burn – fuel, heat, and oxygen. Various firefighting strategies attempt to address one side of the triangle. Water takes away heat, smothering takes away oxygen, and turning off the gas main or clearing brush takes away fuel.

Fire is a self-propagating reaction, in which fuels (typically wood, which is made of many copies of CH2O) react with oxygen to form CO2 and H2O, releasing heat. The rate of the reaction determines the size and speed of the fire. Chemical reaction rates are limited by available surface area, which is why twigs and kindling burn really quickly, while enormous tree trunks burn very slowly. A mountain that is covered in dry spindly grass and dead shrubs burns with great speed and heat, while a mature forest composed of tall living trees and no ground cover sometimes won’t burn at all. 

The severity of a fire is often determined by where it occurs. A ground fire burns sticks and leaves that have fallen to the ground. A surface fire burns low-lying shrubs and smaller trees, separate from but still close to the ground. In extreme conditions and with the help of bridging fuel, a fire can jump from mostly dead leaf litter to the living crown of the forest – lots of tiny twigs surrounded by plenty of oxygen for combustion. 

Remember, the living part of the tree, the cambium layer, is a thin surface between the bark and the core. In extreme heat, the water in the cambium boils, blowing the fire-protectant bark off the tree, creating even more fuel.

When I was a young child in Australia, a crown fire near my home on the New South Wales central coast was so severe running up one hill it not only burned the leaves (many Australian trees can survive this by sprouting more leaves called epicormic shoots) but also the trunk and root system, leaving only smoking holes in the ground. 

Frequent ground fires can burn off fallen litter, keeping the forest floor relatively clear and preventing the level of fuel accumulation that can drive much more destructive fires into the crown of the forest. 

The fire in Altadena appears to have become a “crown style fire” wherein the aerial fuel was not leaves and twigs but the frames and contents of houses ignited and broken open by severe wind gusts. 

Los Angeles often gets strong winds from the northeast, called the “Santa Ana winds”. Although they vary in severity, every decade or so a major blow will knock down trees, cause power outages, and during fire season, accelerate fires. Los Angeles has a mediterranean climate, usually with wetter winters and dry summers. This year, however, the winter rains are yet to arrive, so the forest was unusually dry. 

With a fire like the Eaton fire, at the peak of a wind storm and in a city already fighting the severe Palisades fire at the same time, once the fire is going the battle is already lost. The key is prevention! If the Eaton fire hadn’t started, then today thousands of residents in Altadena would be woodchipping a few fallen trees, fixing a damaged roof here or there, and getting on with their lives.

It’s hard to get your head around the scale of the destruction. Here are two recent videos from helicopter, a video of McDonald’s burning, and a video of Altadena on fire near Lake Avenue.

And here’s a still-incomplete map of the damage.

I worked at Caltech for five years and JPL for four years, I’ve lived in this area for 15 years. I’ve walked all these streets, hiked in the mountains hundreds of times. Dozens of people I know have lost everything. Beautiful streets, beautiful houses, incredible collections of art, music, literature. 

I nearly bought this house, which is a mile and a half from the nearest forest. It had a pool in the backyard and was sheathed in stucco and non-combustible composite roof shingles. 

Houses can be rebuilt, possessions repurchased or remade. As of January 16, 2025, 16 people were confirmed to have lost their lives in this fire, along with another 9 in the Palisades fire. More than 30 more are missing. 

Let’s put the jigsaw puzzle together. This chart, from https://firemap.sdsc.edu/, shows how the Eaton fire fits between the scar of the Bobcat fire (2020 on the right) and the Station fire (2009 on the left). The northeastern edge of Altadena had not burned since 1993. 

The unburned section in the middle near the Mt Lowe-Mt Wilson saddle is where the fire burned out and looks like this – not super combustible.

It is not a surprise that the Eaton fire was contained by the burn scars from previous severe fires, since one of the three sides of the fire triangle is fuel. Thanks to higher than historical levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, plants are growing faster than ever, especially if they have adequate rainfall. Even in relatively arid parts of the world like the Los Angeles mountains, photosynthesis leads to a predictable build up of fuel load in the form of fallen litter, shrubs, and trees. Every year, more fuel is added. After a year or two, the seed bed has sprouted and plants are growing. After five years, shrubs are dense enough that walking requires effort and evasion. After 20 years, fallen litter and growth can be so dense that lost hikers may require a helicopter to extract. 

The biomass accumulation rate is something like 0.5 mm/year (1/64th of an inch), which doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that 20 years of accumulation is equivalent to coating the entire forest in a layer of gasoline ¼” thick. This is not hyperbole, drought resistant trees including eucalypts and creosote secrete volatile oils to help retain moisture, contributing to their combustibility. 

This fact has not gone unnoticed by our ancestors. Taking just Australia and North America, authors including Percy Trezise, Dick Roughsey, Bruce Pascoe, and Charles Mann have extensively documented a variety of indigenous land management practices using fire. Early explorers in these previously-unknown-to-Europeans landscapes described forests that appeared like edenic gardens, because they generally were actually carefully curated and managed for both food production and security. 

Burning off the undergrowth created space for grass to grow, attracting game for hunting. Fire was also used to “run” game off cliffs or onto rough or soft ground for easier and less hazardous hunting. Fire was also used as an offensive and defensive weapon against hostile neighboring tribes, underscoring the importance of keeping fuel loads low. Indigenous people didn’t have water bombing helicopters, so they burned the land on calm, cool winter days, in coordination with neighboring tribes, in small rotating patchworks to prevent catastrophic growth and spread. Bad fires could and did still occur, but people everywhere did whatever they could to prevent them and the fossil and historical record shows they were mostly successful. 

Everywhere except in the contemporary West, where we imagine that our technological mastery excuses us from wild land curation and management. Even today, burning off the undergrowth every few years is a much more manageable approach to hazard reduction than, eg, the impractical army of laborers required to manually clear scrub on often extremely difficult terrain. 

Let’s take some advice from founding father Benjamin Franklin.

“In the February 4, 1735 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin wrote that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Mr Franklin was not referring to medicine when he penned the now-famous line. He instead was referring to the importance of fire safety and the need for the city of Philadelphia to be better prepared to prevent and react to fires. In his article, he noted the importance of tending to how hot coals were being transferred in shovels (primary prevention), how chimneys should be cleaned regularly (primary prevention), and how a “club or society of active men” (firefighters) should be formed who can efficiently extinguish fires (tertiary prevention).” (https://www.medical.theclinics.com/article/S0025-7125(17)30056-1/fulltext)

Hazard reduction burns are not some crazy idea I just came up with. Indeed, even in California they are still conducted in a somewhat desultory manner. But given California’s century of experience with insanely destructive fires, we should ask why we don’t follow Franklin’s advice and spend more of the Golden State’s apparently inexhaustible wealth on prevention?

Before I get to the answer, I will dwell on an illustrative example from my native Australia, which has also suffered from unending catastrophic wildfires, following the Western tradition of modern agricultural and forestry practices. Australia also had problems with hazard reduction fires (“burn offs” or “back burns” in the local language) causing environmental problems, such as smoke, incidental damage to property, etc. Over time, rules accumulated about hazard reduction practices that increased friction to this essential activity and resulted in fewer burns. This reduced occasional problems with air quality, with the entirely predictable outcome that instead, unpredictable and intermittent catastrophes occurred, each with terrible environmental consequences that far outweighed the savings of ever-increasing regulatory pressure on hazard reduction activities.

Afterall, it is possible to place an endless thicket of regulations on deliberate human activities, but one can’t simply outlaw wildfires and horrific destruction and loss of life. That requires planning and forethought. At the same time, safeguarding the environment for both human uses and wild animals requires reduction of severe fires. They’re not typically counted on statistics, but catastrophic fires that vaporize all the trees and sterilize the seed bed are bad news for the birds and kangaroos, too!

To take just one example, the Black Saturday fires of February 7, 2009 killed 173 people and destroyed thousands of structures, including substantially entire towns. 

In an ongoing process of regulatory adjustment and reform, the New South Wales fire service most recently adopted rule 10/50, which gives homeowners the right to clear trees within 10 meters of a home and non-tree vegetation within 50 meters of a home, without approvals. No friction!

In contrast, in the US, well-intended but poorly considered rule changes frequently make it harder to comply with regulations and increase friction, reducing the ability to do the obviously correct thing.

For federal- and state-funded fire prevention efforts, laws like NEPA and CEQA are often weaponized by special interest advocacy groups, resulting in ludicrous outcomes such as the US Forest Service spending 40% of its budget (!) on permitting-related activities. 

NEPA, a law passed in 1970, was intended to help protect the environment. Subsequent regulatory interpretation (now in doubt due to Chevron being overturned) has expanded the law from just five pages of text to an overwhelming blizzard of rules that have brought our ability to build things to a grinding halt. California’s local version of NEPA, CEQA, similarly ties the hands of state agencies whose very mission is preventing all kinds of natural disasters from destroying our cities.

Here’s a summary of the delays wrought by “environmental protection” legislation and process on wildfire hazard reduction.

This is nationwide, not just unique to California. Remember, after 5 years even dry chaparral scrub has accumulated enough biomass to burn well – and it literally takes longer than that to complete an Environmental Impact Statement review. Here’s a more comprehensive list of forests that literally burned down while their forest-protection hazard reduction burns were held up by NEPA reviews, often for 5-7 years! If you’re wondering what the Platonic Ideal of a failed law supported by failed regulatory policy and a failed state looks like – this is it!

Explain this to the tens of thousands of law abiding tax paying citizens in Los Angeles who lost their homes this week. Explain to them why this process, aided and abetted by layer after layer of corrupt, self-serving regulators/consultants/affiliates/NGOs/501c3 charitable organizations, is fair or reasonable. Maybe we can take some of the millions of printed pages of these nonsense, useless “Environmental Impact Statements” and use them to build a new roof over their heads.

This is not a new realization. Governor Newsom, in office now for six years, attempted to formulate a streamlined CEQA workflow for fire hazard reduction burns, but was forced to concede that complying with the new workflow is even slower and more onerous than the default option. Under his leadership, California expanded its fleet of fire fighting tanker aircraft, but in the strong Santa Ana winds last week, they were unable to fly due to severe turbulence. Once the catastrophic fire has started, it is too late. As Ben Franklin said, prevention is better than cure.

Even if the tankers can fly, the bright pink fire retardant Phos-Chek is not super great for the environment. 

Why does the process chart look like this? It’s not really a process chart – it’s an org chart. Why does handling a US Forest Service proposal to conduct a hazard reduction burn take five years? Every arrow and box on this org chart represents an unaccountable, unelected, unfireable fiefdom. It is the epitome of rent-seeking “job security” for a class of worse-than-useless bureaucrats whose only job is to keep our cities safe from fire, and whose collective self-serving glacially slow BS self-evidently continues to be prioritized over keeping citizens safe.

What happens when well-meaning regulatory reform, such as that described above, occurs? Various factions of the US governing layer attempt to settle their differences in court, often at extreme cost. This is complicated by the fact that huge swaths of land in the US west is federally owned and managed, with every kind of overlapping jurisdiction perversity you can possibly imagine.

Here’s Isaiah Taylor’s summary of a few legal actions taken against common sense hazard reduction burns.

Sierra Club (better known for accepting bribes large undisclosed donations from the gas industry) successfully litigated the US Forest Service over their attempt to create a NEPA categorical exclusion. The Center for Biological Diversity informed the BLM they would sue over a fuel reduction plan.

I do not know exactly why these ostensibly environmentalist organizations move in lockstep to block these and other actions that actually protect the environment, including the development of lower carbon power sources. It could be ignorance or it could be some fundamentalist underlying anti-humanist ideology – who am I to say? It is not unusual to hear shards of the environmentalist movement make claims like “those houses should never have been built there” or “humans are a blight on the face of the universe” as though that excuses positive actions taken to prevent high efficacy hazard and harm reduction measures.

Various regulatory reform efforts failed to pass both houses at both state and federal levels.

While we’re listing various regulatory issues in need of reform, in addition to NEPA/CEQA and the horde of parasitic opportunistic so-called advocacy groups that weaponize the laudable democratic features of these laws against the tax paying citizens they are intended to protect, we also have (not exhaustive list – let me know which ones I’ve missed!)

The California Coastal Commission, an unelected junta of “nyet men” who reflexively block development of any coastal infrastructure, including the sort of large-scale desalination that could ease California’s water shortages and provide enough water to a) irrigate land near human population centers thereby reducing combustibility and b) fight fires when they occur.

The Federal Aviation Administration, whose ongoing intransigence on commercial drones has handed China a 20-year lead on this critical technology and also denied the US their application in forest management and fire fighting.

LA county zoning, which continues to exacerbate a critical housing shortage by preventing infill development in less hazardous areas and forcing people to live in areas prone to natural disasters. This is another example of “death by a thousand cuts” where a continually growing thicket of regulations that help one constituency (landed homeowners) by artificially inflating the value of their assets at the cost of another constituency (typically younger renters whose family formation rates are severely hampered by a lack of affordable housing) leads to much more expensive consequences in the longer term (demographic crisis, non-conforming ancient housing stock, and disaster-prone communities). These trade offs require leadership who can sell the necessity of decisions that prioritize the needs of the many over the needs of the few or the one – leadership that is in high demand and short supply!

Fire resource management, which apparently left crucial reservoirs empty for uncompleted maintenance for well over a year. Much of this infrastructure was built a century ago in less time and for less money than it supposedly costs the taxpayer today to keep it in barely working order. There’s a huge grift going on here.

All this discussion may come as a surprise to anyone who has taken a US civics class, and erroneously believes we live in a representative republican democracy, wherein elected representatives make laws that govern the free commerce between people, businesses, and their government. Afterall, at no point in the federal or California state code does it say “under no circumstances are hazard reduction burns allowed, as it is the official government policy that forests be allowed to accumulate fuel for decades until massively destructive fires are unavoidable”. And yet, here we are. So how did this happen?

If we follow Charlie Munger’s advice to “invert”, let us instead understand that the law is the necessarily poorly defined set of rules and regulations that govern how the state is actually run, and bears, at best, a passing resemblance to the millions of pages of written federal and state code and accompanying regulations. In this analysis, it is quite clearly the law that hazard reduction burns are illegal, since despite their utility being extremely high and their cost almost trivially low (recall that indigenous societies that lack writing and money seem to be able to allocate the necessary resources for their successful execution) they do not occur at anything like the rate necessary to provide actual protection to people and property.

Who, then, governs us? Who is actually making law?

The answer is a handful of unelected specialists in bureaucracy. The key decision makers within the US Forest Service, CALFIRE, the BLM, the CCC, and their symbiotes at the Sierra Club, The John Muir Project, the Center for Biological Diversity and so on could fit quite easily onto a single Greyhound bus. You don’t know their names. They never appear on TV. They are unelected. Their position is often based on seniority rather than merit. They are effectively unfireable and thus unaccountable to anyone, not even the duly elected Governor. Generally speaking their salaries are far from exceptional, particularly in the public service and non-profit space. They’re not doing it for yacht money and it’s a fair assumption that for most of them (as well as most of us), a career in the upper echelons of business or private industry would be unattainable. Generally they are well-intentioned first order thinkers whose local ideological gradient and surrounding incentive landscape dictates their actions with eerie predictability. All of them are opinionated as to the cause and responsibility for these fires, and none of them will point a finger inward. These are the people who make the law that governs you. These are the people that claim de facto authority to control nearly every aspect of your life. These are the people whose individual and collective incompetence resulted in your house burning to the ground. 

As of January 16, the dust hasn’t quite settled but between the Eaton and Palisades fires, around 10000 structures have been destroyed and 25 people killed, with about 38,000 acres burned. The cost is expected to exceed $50b, partly because Los Angeles’ legacy of short-sighted zoning decisions has driven up housing costs, and thus the costs of all services provided by people who need to live in houses, including construction, policing, and firefighting. It’s almost like housing is a 10,000 year old technology that we’ve made artificially scarce for no good reason.

Let’s discuss the current response by Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom, starting with early weather predictions.

For years fire fighting authorities, aware of the central dereliction of responsibility in hazard reduction, have warned about a lack of funding, staffing, and resources. Instead of solving these problems, instead we received saturation media coverage for days in advance warning of strong Santa Ana winds and high fire risk, in the form of “red flag” warnings.

What was the city’s response to red flag warnings? Mayor Bass took off on a junket to Africa and civilians raked their yards and furtively watered their lawns against water conservation regulations that are expected to make up for a half century of under-investment in water procurement infrastructure. At this point, it was too late – the die was cast. The time to conduct hazard reduction burns safely on LA’s hills was years, or decades before. Or even during the previous and much wetter winter. By the time the wind was picking up, the fates of Pacific Palisades and Altadena were sealed.

Who else paid attention to saturation media coverage of red flag warnings? Evidently, a city full of deranged arsonists began to hyperventilate and frantically collate their kits of accelerants and blow torches. ABC7 reported at least 300 fires were started intentionally during this period, stretching already underfunded, understaffed firefighting resources even further. Some crazy people love to light fires, evidently, and many more began systematic looting operations in evacuated neighborhoods. 

There’s obviously a broader conversation to be had here about mental illness and criminality, but media generally doesn’t publicize suicides because doing so is known to induce copycat behavior. It’s not exactly a surprise to find that while 99.9% of people respond to “fire danger” warnings appropriately, some fraction reach for the matches. Perhaps, instead of spending public resources multiplying colors and flags of public safety warnings, we could ask the state that already taxes us so heavily to just solve the public safety issues. Afterall, they have a monopoly on legitimate violence. 

During an official press conference on January 9, someone somehow managed to send an emergency evacuation order to all 10 million residents in LA County – a new high water mark for gross misuse of this tool. Instead of being woken in the middle of the night by a phone buzzing about a custody dispute 100 miles away, we had millions of frightened people further terrorized by a governing apparatus that not only can’t manage basic fire prevention, they also can’t build a public notification system without pushing the big red button by accident! [Three times!]

Haha, whoopsie! Who amongst us hasn’t accidentally panicked the second largest city in the US? One begins to wonder if this sort of basic system level dysfunction isn’t the biggest frustration experienced by Chinese hackers attempting to implant doomsday backdoors in all our critical infrastructure. 

Okay, what else can city, state, and federal officials do about this disaster? We got a whole series of desperate and poorly conceived reactive policies, none of which address the root causes of the fire, are able to do much about the losses of the fire, or will do anything to prevent the next fire.

Price controls on insurance

Since 1988 under Prop 103, the Californian insurance industry has been heavily regulated. In practice, this means that insurers can calculate risk premiums but, like regulated utilities, need government permission to raise rates. Raising rates is politically unpopular, so insurers tend to cancel policies they can no longer justify, many of them in the areas that just burned. Insurers are in a bind, because their risk is driven up by government inaction on risk reduction, and their ability to recover costs is crushed by that same government. They leave the market. The CA state government’s response is to form a publicly funded insurer, which recently was barely solvent with about $200m in reserves, or about $20,000 per lost structure. This is not going to cover losses, to put it mildly. 

Some out-of-state insurers operate in California, and charge an excess of over $100,000 on home insurance – an accurate estimate of the true risk being run by homeowners. Relatives in Australia are reporting that insurers there are already affected by contagion from the LA fires and are jacking up renewal rates. The CA state response to insurers exiting this dysfunctional market in droves is not to allow them to charge a fair premium for the risk they’re forced to hold, but to ban insurers from dropping coverage for anyone in the affected zones for another year. On the one hand – they’re not going to burn again. On the other, this can only accelerate the major insurers – if they survive – pulling out of the state as soon as they can.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect CA taxpayers from across the state to end up holding the bag here, but I think this is also a cautionary tale about 1) the threat of demagoguery via direct democracy and 2) excessive market manipulation by regulators. Price controls create scarcity. In an ideal world, CA regulators would interface with the insurance industry by ensuring that it stays competitive, by lowering barriers to entry, and most importantly by listening to their highly trained actuaries about which policy changes would reduce risk. Note that this is in marked contrast to how insurance has actually been run for the last 36 years, with predictable results.

Much more comprehensive thread from Kim-Mai Cutler, and another from Patrick “patio11” “dangerous professional” McKenzie, and another from Ian Gutterman. 

Price controls on rentals and construction

Mayor Bass zoomed back from her trip to Ghana to attend a series of agonizingly embarrassing press conferences, her city anxious to hear how she would lead them beyond this crisis. Her response: price controls on rentals and construction. At a time where LA’s already catastrophically stressed supply of housing has shrunk even further, with more than 100,000 people displaced by home losses and evacuations, we desperately need additional supply brought into the market. The genius of a market capitalist system is that supply is elastic and allowing prices to increase (e.g. Uber surge pricing) brings additional supply into the market. Provided barriers to entry are low, additional supply is also competitive, limiting price increases. Prices are information that solve the Hayek knowledge problem. 

The fires are a horror. It is a different kind of horror to come slowly to the realization that the mayor of the second largest city in the US is somehow unaware of the basics of supply and demand, or that fixing prices creates artificial scarcity. With just this one economically illiterate policy, Mayor Bass has greatly exacerbated the housing shortage. Houses don’t come from nowhere! Construction crews don’t spring from the Earth fully formed!

We’re going to need a lot of construction capacity to rebuild these parts of LA. It would be great if some companies that specialize in commercial construction switched over to residential, or if some companies that operate in other cities came here to increase capacity. It seems unlikely that they could change their operations like this at zero cost – so that cost must be borne by the consumer. But if Mayor Bass believes, like the Soviet Politburo, that prices should be set by fiat, or whatever they were last Thursday, and enforces her belief with policy, she has simply zeroed out any incentive for these additional construction crews to come to LA. Why would they, knowing that if they offer their honest and desperately needed services at a reasonable price, negotiated between free people, Mayor Bass is prepared to single them out for blame on this disaster that, unlike her, they bear no responsibility for. Instead, she should be finding ways to reduce friction on licensing and construction approvals!

Mayor Bass, point the finger inwards and publicly revoke price control measures, if you care about your city!

Price controls on land sales

Not to be outdone, Governor Newsom dropped an EO on “predatory real estate sales”. This is just weird. In a situation where tens of thousands of people are still evacuated, and thousands more are now homeless, fires are still burning, and the incandescently stupid regulations that led directly to dozens of destructive fires including these ones still stand, apparently the problem worthy of a press conference is people offering to buy ruined houses – in a state where rebuilding will probably take years. Any landowner can always say “no”. 

Speculation has swirled as to whether this is an attempt to make wrecked neighborhoods harder to depopulate, since both Pacific Palisades and Altadena are relatively high income communities full of the sorts of taxpayers who have been fleeing California in recent years. 

Or perhaps the land changing hands without approved new construction would lock in lower Prop 13 land tax revenue than the state was counting on. 

But we should probably not ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. 

Governor Newsom harbors the least secret presidential ambitions in the history of the world, so let’s see what else his office has to offer during this trying time for Angelenos?

A stern warning about looting

Prior to activating the national guard, Governor Newsom warned prospective looters that theft was illegal – as if they didn’t know that numerous CA DAs were no longer prosecuting “petty theft” under $950 – a mind-boggling policy that has all but destroyed retail in downtown San Francisco. Incredibly, city officials there have responded to business owners going bankrupt from incessant theft, not with spending their billions of dollars on law enforcement and public safety, but with yet another blizzard of regulations banning owners of failed businesses from closing up shop without permission from the same city government that has snoozed through years of high taxes and zero protection of private property. It’s exactly the same playbook now being used to punish insurers! 

I also found it particularly droll to get a lecture on looting from the governor of a state which takes up to 14.4% income tax from everyone but can’t even amend CEQA to prevent its most prosperous cities from burning to the ground. 

Suspension of CEQA, but only for burned areas

Governor Newsom signed another EO, this time suspending CEQA and the Coastal Act, and also throwing in some price controls for construction costs, just to make sure that contractors are properly punished for trying to build, even outside of Mayor Bass’ jurisdiction. 

This EO also broke my brain. Apparently the state will fold like a house of cards over and over and over again in the face of petty bullying from the Sierra Club when it comes to selective enforcement of CEQA and the Coastal Act on routine hazard reduction burns, green energy development, desalination, infill development, rezoning, permitting reform, and any number of other existential crises that plague this state. 

But, when it comes to rebuilding a few residential neighborhoods whose very fate was sealed by these laws, the Governor can just cancel them if he feels like it? There is a caveat though, the rebuilding must be substantially similar to the pre-existing structures. No densification, no planning-level natural disaster hazard reduction, no infill development is allowed! Housing must remain catastrophically scarce across the state! 

Fancy claiming the authority to defang CEQA or the CCC by EO and wasting it on something so trivial. Governor Newsom, you could have blanket approved upzoning, or construction of 5 TW of solar, or desalinating enough water to recover Central Valley agriculture, the Owens Valley, and develop the Imperial Valley. 

A check from Joe Biden for $770

At this point I don’t think anyone knows who’s actually running the Biden administration, but the oddly specific number of $770 has been generated for people affected by the fires. This is a nice gesture that will cover about two nights in a hotel and a change of clothes, but can I not cash the check in return for NEPA being deleted? I would frankly rather my friends still had their houses. It’s not like NEPA is critical infrastructure for some other pillar of society. How much pain do we need to learn this lesson?

How do any of these policies and interventions make it easier to build? How do they reduce friction to “do the right thing”? At this point, I don’t know a single person who can accurately estimate the final costs of this disaster, or how long it will take to rebuild the affected areas. Given that the insurers are, by default, now globally insolvent, and that the Trump administration is unlikely to bail them out for 100 cents on the dollar, and that local and state leadership seems to be sending the strongest possible signal (through attempted price controls) that expedient rebuilding will be blocked at every turn, it is possible that these areas will never be rebuilt.

As for Los Angeles, we can easily predict future fires in areas that haven’t burned. Let’s put on our insurance actuary hat and look at the map. 

These maps are adapted from https://firemap.sdsc.edu/, which has a layer for historical fires. 

The areas above in red have burned historically and will burn again, but haven’t burned in the last 5 years. Typically after five years, there is enough regrowth to sustain a burn in mild conditions. These are the areas that should be divided into discrete patches and then systematically burned off every 5-10 years on a rotating schedule, before their fuel loads grow beyond the point where safe hazard reduction is possible with fire. Once this patchwork is established, growth of megafires even in extreme conditions is practically impossible, since any fire will be largely surrounded by more recently depleted zones.

The areas above in red have burned historically and will burn again, but haven’t burned in the last 20 years. Typically after 20 years, there is enough regrowth that it can be difficult to sustain a safe burn, even in mild conditions. These areas are ticking time bombs. You and I and everyone else can see on this map, or on a hike through these areas, that government indifference and incompetence has left anyone who lives near these areas vulnerable to a disaster that will definitely occur, and most likely within the next decade. Given sufficiently mild weather, it may be possible to burn these areas safely in the hours before a predicted rain storm, but timely assurance of safety may only be possible through the enormously expensive manual removal of brush through tens of thousands of acres of incredibly rough terrain – an action which is also blocked by default by CEQA, unfunded by default, and if history is any guide, not going to happen. Your insurers are looking at this same map, so if State Farm dropped you – that’s why. I don’t think FAIR will be able to pick up the tab anymore either.

How are we supposed to go forward and scrape out an existence here on the edge of the Pacific Ocean? Our forebears understood that California was a half-finished land, a wild land of natural beauty and possibility, but one that required human vision and care to complete. The modern California exists only because of the labors and foresight of people who lived long before we were born, in whose manifested paradise we grew, and whose man-made underpinnings we have failed to understand, value, or maintain. Fires and droughts are natural, but we bear responsibility for their effects on us. If the skies don’t give us enough rain, we can easily make more water – if we choose. It is cheap compared to our present level of wealth and technical accomplishment. If the mountains give us fire, we can curate and control their fuel levels so our children can sleep in peace knowing that their neighborhood is safe from man-made disasters. 

How many more cities must burn before we decide we have suffered enough?