As they’re doing with energy, they could implement progressive premium schemes for income redistribution purposes.
The richer public services and lower inequality should keep the state’s population boom thundering on.
a price cap on insurance means that properties in the urban cores should be able to continue to get policies, and properties in the woods will be essentially uninsurable. if you can reduce the number of houses being built in the woods, you can let a wildfire burn without having the bad press of losing so many homes.
The Federal department executed the burn and it went wild, and is the largest fire in recorded history in that area now, taking out an entire town plus other structures and causing the evacuation of Los Alamos National Laboratories at the same time. you can find the details easily.. there is a 70 page "final report" from the agency perspective. This is reality.
Historical controlled burns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in...) worked because they happened frequently and kept fuel in check while encouraging trees that were resistant to or even dependent on low grade fires. Fuel loads are dramatically higher than historically however.
Now we've also got massive areas of forest dieback due to climate-driven bark beetle outbreaks. Trees that do survive burns but are stressed by them are more vulnerable to pests, just like drought stress. https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/bark-beetles-and-climate... So controlled burns even done effectively may still result in unwanted tree dieback.
A much safer potential cure here would be a massive increase in targeted grazing on federal land to reduce understory fuel loads, but this is also a nonstarter politically in many areas especially in National Parks. We are still maintaining this myth of virgin wilderness untouched by the hand of man.
State and federal government simply isn't competent enough to handle this given the political realities in a democratic system. Basically what's going to happen is that the most vulnerable communities will get scorched out of existence, and we're just going to have to live with the impact of more wildfires until nature sorts itself out. Americans just can’t psychologically accept being told they don’t get to develop anywhere they want.
Yup! I live in the Sierras. Everyone in this thread talking about controlled burns needs to say "California has just spent a century pursuing a policy of fire suppression" a few times.
The fuel loads are insane, these fires have been turning into giant firestorms with their own weather systems in a matter of 2 or 3 hours during the summer. I've watched it happen a few times, frightening. I suspect you can't solve this problem with fire because even if you are burning the brush wet there is still enough fuel to dry the forest out and burn it to ash.
I personally think the state should tell insurers that they only have to provide insurance in wildlands if the home/property meets stringent fire safety rules around defensible space. My house isn't even in the coniferous forest (I live in the chaparral) and it has set backs, greenzones, the works. I get so frustrated when I'm watching news coverage of the fires and the house is surrounded in pine duff and has giant pine trees right next to it.
> much safer potential cure here would be a massive increase in targeted grazing on federal land to reduce understory fuel loads
Yeah, my dad, a California native, who studied forestry at Davis always says that the solution in millions of goats. Ironically this spring the local Sacramento news reported that there was a shortage of goats to clear brush and that was just for commercial landscaping in the greater metro area. So not only is not feasible because of green hand wringing but also because we just don't have adequate goats.
Most ranchers who do brush control grazing get paid for doing so. This is the opposite of the federal policy today, where ranchers have to pay for grazing rights on BLM land. Not to mention the fact that some places we used to graze sheep on like Yosemite or Sequoia National Parks have a blanket ban on commercial grazing.
Instead, what we have is wildlife conservation groups killing bills to expand grazing in CA. https://mountainlion.org/2021/04/29/ab434-california-state-p...
that's not the start of a conversation that finds solutions. Obviously there is lot of hurt and urgency, also there have been a lot of bad bills, also there is a lot of private land grab on public property, also the existing policies have led us here.
AND.. when I read the actual research, there is far more already known, than anyone at the negotiating table seems to know.. so you get bullies and spies, angry side comments and behind-the-scenes demands..
far, far too late to just call the other side of the table uncomplimentary names, if you are serious about this.
There should be alignment of interests between environmental groups and rural people who don't want their communities destroyed by wildfire. Neither of them want the forests burned down. Instead, these groups pursue a singleminded focus on attacking anything that doesn’t comply with their dogmatic pursuit of wilderness untouched by anything other than recreation.
as i understand it, there's been a fair bit of progress in the last couple years regarding best practice for wildfire protection in populated areas. you can do a lot by removing underbrush and building firebreaks around a town, as well as relatively simple measures like disallowing cedar-shake roofs. there's probably a future where properties in towns that implement strong wildfire protection plans can continue to be insured, and towns that don't cease to exist. but that only solves the problem for towns, i don't see what can be done for properties in the woods outside a town's firebreak.
NorCal with the thick forests, you’d need to clear cut so much, you’d be irreversibly altering the landscape and will probably get other bad things for it, such as erosion and landslides. The vegetation will also try to grow back aggressively (NorCal is a lot wetter than SoCal). So you’d end up doing this over and over again. It’s unlikely to be economical.
Ah, I see you've never tried to do anything involving water or drainage in California
Firefighting resources are already stretched thin. Adding more bureaucracy on top of these tough logistics make any preventative burns impossible to plan since CARB can just deny it the last minute.
CARB performs a useful function (acid rain anyone?), but if you asked most people in CA, I suspect wildfires will come in a lot higher on the list than smog from occasional burns. With uncontrolled fires, even more smoke and who knows what else goes into the air already.
Nobody wants the LA smog of the 1970s back, but controlled burns are largely impossible much of the year due to their effects on air quality.
Wildland firefighters - of whom I count several among my cousins - are between a rock and a hard place on this issue. They spend more of each year in “fire season” in part because they cannot pollute the air during “not fire season” with controlled burns.
Hopefully one day we get a study that shows the fires end up spewing even more pollutants than any controlled burn, so the net effect of not doing these controlled burns is likely a lot worse.
Allowing new pollution spewing gas guzzlers to continue to be produced and sold until 2035 is absurd. They should ban production in 5 years and ban use by 2035.
For personal vehicles that would hit the sector of population least able to afford an EV. Incentives and cash for clunkers type programs work better than forcing a financial burden on folks.
The other problem is that we don’t yet have good alternative to heavy diesel trucks. Sweden is experimenting with some cool options and we need a similar infra investment: https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/05/09/sweden-is-building-... and https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...
The problem is that the last article is from 2016. All the investment is still going to long battery ranges and such, when if we built infra like this, trucking companies would switch due to much lower costs.
To a naive mind that doesn't know much about insurance this sounds untrue. I'd be willing to insure houses myself with as many funds as I could get at 33% of the property value per year, for example.
Say 10% of your claims are against some natural disaster, and they will either not get triggered at all, or all get triggered at the same time. That's an uncomfortable situation - this is what is called catastrophe risk. Ideally as an insurer you want lots of uncorrelated risks and the strong law of large numbers is on your side.
Insurers typically outsource such catastrophy risks (to some extent anyway) to reinsurers, ie insurers to insurers, but (a) that's not a hard guarantee of risk mitigation and (b) they still have to pay for it.
I can imagine that in this whole quagmire, and considering what people would pay for insurance, it's easier to just pass.
Also, California cities don't even have the money to bulldoze the trees in an N-mile radius around them. California did log the entire Sierra Nevadas a hundred years ago, yes but those trees were valuable and there actually weren't as many of them (due to the fire ecology). A hundred years of fire suppression forestry and logging have turned the Sierras into a giant thicket - filled with small trees and shrubs with no market value, not easy to remove and ready to explode.
insufficient detail, plus people lied in writing to get paid in Sacramento because "who could know"
basically a BS statement, right?
We have a national disaster insurance entity[0], but coverage from them is tied to insurance from an insurance company. So as insurers start to refuse to insure houses at proven high risk of natural disaster, then the EQC coverage isn't applicable either.
It will suck for some communities, but it's the reality of climate change that some of those changes are gong to suck.
And I just can't believe that California, like Australia, has allowed so much residential development in ecosystems where fire is a natural part. Not sure if it's the triumph of hope over facts, or just plain ostriching.
Eventually it reaches a point where the state puts so much burden on the insurance company that they decide it's uneconomic to operate there and leave. Any insurance company refusing to write should be interpreted as a whack with a clue-by-4.
My guess is that it's a structural dynamic - something like a hurricane is bound to trip the cat reinsurance thresholds for all the insurance companies, which means they have very little incentive to actually verify claims/monitor fraud, since it's the reinsurers eating that cost.
You do lose the market signals about the real cost to insure when you do this though. Ultimately we have to change where we build but that's a HUGE undertaking and it's unclear where the political will for that will come from.
Please God no. I already lose more than I get to the government in taxes on every marginal dollar I make.
Somehow, though, the “bailout” boogeyman is never called out for the states, even though they got hundreds of billions of essentially no-strings-attached “Covid relief” dollars from the Feds.
The idea that individual states could have fiscal responsibility and no funding from the feds would require that the federal reserve stop that fountain of new money. But the economic priests have decided that this must never happen, lest the plebs stop having to work as much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Property_Insurance_Co...
CA has required since the 80s that insurers that offer homeowner insurance also offer earthquake. However, after the ‘94 Northridge earthquake, 93% of insurers had either stopped offering or greatly restricted their property insurance underwriting in CA.
Now the CEA sells two thirds of the earthquake insurance policies in CA.
So if the insurance companies don’t step up and underwrite, CA may very well do just what you said.
Except that they’re doing a horrible job and PGE continues to rob people with impunity.
Which it's going to do with insulin, but the market for that seems broken. The property insurance market is pretty competitive.
Long term tax burden goes down, nobody lives in the hot zone
I wonder how it could work with existing fallow real estate that isn’t in those fire prone areas
So, how would some organization help move all those at risk people into existing vacant real estate in a way that benefits the at risk homeowner?
Don't like the way PG&E operates? Take it over and make it a public utility.
State Leg: crickets chirping.
Behold, the California Fair Plan:
Technically not a State agency. They force registered insurers to participate in a pool and insure homes. It should be called "California Forced Plan" or something worse.
In practice, it's a horrific thing. I know people paying $6,000 per year for home insurance when, in other parts of the State you can insure a home for $800 per year.
Fires, you say?
Yeah, no, not a single bush burned in their neighborhood in 30 years.
What happens is that some incomprehensible grouping of State, City, County...whatever agencies get together and declare entire regions as high fire hazard zones. That's pretty much a license to rape and pillage.
Check out the map:
https://osfm.fire.ca.gov/media/6636/fhszs_map.pdf
The whole thing is, from my perspective, a horrific authoritarian overreach.
Why do I say this?
Look at those areas and research how many homes exist in them compared to the rest of State. Then get data on how many homes per year burn down due to brush or forest fires. That part is important. You cannot count homes that burned down because a 3D printer caught fire in the garage or someone started an oil fire while cooking and could not put it out.
If you are going to classify an entire region as an extreme fire danger region, you'd better have lots of fires caused by events well outside anyone's home. You know, brush fires.
The truth of the matter is that the numbers don't justify any of this. They are taking advantage of people.
There are approximately 12 million housing units in California [1]. Out of those, between 2005 and 2022, some 65,000 structures were lost o wildfires.
That averages out to about 0.03% properties lost per year to wildfires.
And that number is deeply skewed by abnormal way-out-of-the-norm activity during three out of 18 years. If we take out these three data points we go from 65K properties lost down to 20K. Which means somewhere in the order of 0.01% of properties lost to wildfires under normal circumstances.
So, somewhere between 0.01% and 0.03% lies a sensible estimate. And for this ridiculous number they castigate a massive portion of the CA population with this high fire risk rating that causes their premiums to explode.
There's a lot more to this [3]. If you look at home fires at a national level (over 300K per year), the leading causes are cooking and heating equipment. And yet, once again, with 140 million housing units in the US, that number represents 0.2% of the housing units per year.
In other words, if we are going to talk about averages (not always a good idea), the national average for homes burning down due to fires not related to wildfires, is TEN TIMES greater than the percentage of housing units burned down in CA due to wildfires.
Conclusion: People are getting robbed. Insurance companies are just fine.
[1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/census/california/housing-stat...
[2] https://headwaterseconomics.org/natural-hazards/structures-d...
[3] https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/house-fire-stati...
not sure the State is equipped to take over the first level of insurance...go to the DMV some time and ask if that is who you want to deal with when you have roof damage from hail etc