From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
David Sirota 0:04
From the Lever's, reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm David Sirota, 150 years after the Great Chicago Fire was seared into American history. The great Los Angeles fire engulfed the country's second most populous city. The fire this week spread like well wildfire incinerating 1000s of structures, forcing 10s of 1000s of people to evacuate, and casting a pall of thick smoke over the California coastline, harrowing images of people fleeing huge flames became the latest visual representation of life in the era of climate chaos. On this first episode of a two part lever time series on the Los Angeles fires, we're going to go deep and look at why this Blaze is different and arguably even more foreboding than so many others we've already seen as global temperatures rise,
whether or not you live in Southern California or have friends and relatives there, this is a disaster that evokes huge questions about the future of life in America, questions touching on everything from where is safe to live, how communities can protect themselves from such disasters, whether Insurance is even obtainable, and why our politics seem unable to effectively respond to a terrifying, ongoing emergency threatening to destabilize our entire society. It is
Speaker 1 1:31
safe to say that the Palisades fire is one of the most destructive natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles. This
David Sirota 1:39
is Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristen Crowley, offering the grim news to America as Southern California wildfires continue to rage out of control. One
Speaker 2 1:49
home is on fire, and right over here job, you can see more people coming with their horses. They're trying to rescue their animals. Can you imagine just, Oh, my goodness, these embers flying everywhere.
David Sirota 2:05
As of this recording, more than 9000 homes and buildings have reportedly been damaged or destroyed in the Los Angeles fires. 130,000 people have been under evacuation orders, and the economic losses could reportedly run up to $50 billion geographically, these fires actually dwarf the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 statistics and words can't really do justice to the scope of the destruction in Los Angeles, but if you've been online, you don't need to rely on words. You've probably seen the images in the quest to find the perfect metaphor for these dark times. The ongoing destruction of Southern California offers a smorgasbord. There's the video of a McDonald's about to go up in flames, and there's the video of the weirdly calm living room scene being engulfed by flames while the family dog panics. Welcome to Life in the era of climate chaos, where large swaths of the country are becoming Tinder boxes because of the ever hotter world brought to us by fossil fuels, as the Associated Press put it, quote, California's wildfire season is beginning earlier and ending later due to rising temperatures and decreased rainfall tied to climate change, according to recent data, dry winds, including the notorious Santa Anas, have contributed to warmer than average temperatures in Southern California, which has not seen more than point one inches of rain since early May, even for those who've become numb to the now constant climate mayhem of floods, wildfires, hurricanes and other weather related chaos engulfing the country, this feels different, and I don't think it's just because the fires are happening In one of the cultural capitals of the world. Next week, senior Podcast Producer Arjun Singh is going to give us a deep dive on how the politics and business interests of urban sprawl set the stage for the devastation of this week. But LA's fires revealed another dire truth, one that I want to explore today. To put it simply, it showed us that we are not prepared for fires like this. That's the headline of a piece by New York Times reporter David Wallace wells, the author of the book The uninhabitable Earth life after warming to begin today's episode of lever time, I caught up with Wallace wells and asked him why the Los Angeles fires this week seem like a genuine turning point. There's
David Wallace-Wells 4:49
a lot of different stuff going on that's different now, but I think the most striking feature of the new fire regime, which is to say over the last 10 years or so in North America. Is not the intensity of fires, although that's increasing. It's not the size of fires, although that's increasing. It's not the total area burned across the state or across the American West, across Canada, although those are hugely up to because of primarily climate factors. It's that we're seeing a new kind of fire, which is a fire that begins in the wildland urban interface, but then breaks into what is effectively at least a suburban and maybe even an urban environment, where we see homes and concrete streets and sidewalks. We don't see much brush, we don't see much forest cover. And it's not that there's destruction and devastation because there's a few homes surrounded by trees that are on fire, but that the fire is actually burning from home to home, turning those houses into fuel. It's fundamentally a different kind of fire. Requires a different kind of firefighting, and it requires much more and different prep than we've been sort of thinking about or worrying over when we talk about thinning out forests in the California mountains or whatever. This is an urban fire. We didn't used to have to live with urban fire. But they are back, and they are terrifying, as the devastation in Palisades shows. So here's
David Sirota 6:14
the question then, is, why are they back? When I think of an urban fire, I think of, you know, in history, the Great Chicago Fire, right? And the and the wonder fire, yeah, yeah. And, I guess the the idea in my mind, I can't even remember if this is true, but it's somehow started with a cow and the houses were wooden. And I that might all be nonsense, like an old wives tale, but that's what it is in my mind. And I guess my question then becomes, okay, so we're now dealing again with urban fires. In theory, we learn some lessons from things like the Great Chicago Fire, like maybe all the houses shouldn't be would if that was actually part of the problem? Again, I'm not sure if it was, but I guess the question then is, why are urban fires back? And does the return of urban fires something we should have known about for a long time? How does it, or does it connect to the climate crisis?
David Wallace-Wells 7:15
The conditions that produce fires that can move like this are changing because of climate change, which is to say the intensity of heat produces larger fires. They're able to turn more things into fuel. Some things about the way that houses are built now are different than they were even 20 or 30 years ago. There's a lot more petroleum product in furniture, in clothing and closets. So houses that seem to a norm me or novice like you or me to be resistant to fire are now actually much less resistant to fire than we might guess. The lessons that we learned in places like Chicago in the 19th century have to some extent been forgotten. Firefighters in urban areas are out of practice in a significant way, but it's actually the interaction between landscape fire, wildland fire and urban fire. That is different. Here you can have, you know, it's not just, you know, a cow tipping over or whatever. It's not like one match in a suburban environment. It's that you get a big enough wildfire right next to a bunch of houses which were built there for a number of reasons, including bad housing policy. Once they were built, they were not built, you know, to be sufficiently safe in these conditions when cities and communities offer new rules about, you know, clearing area around your house, making sure that nothing flammable is within five feet. You know, rules about what kinds of plants you can and can have in your yard. Homeowners resist that, and they often win that fight of resistance, and the result is that the community is much, much more poorly prepared for for the moment when a bad fire arrives, some to some extent, something like what happened in Palisades is it's such a devastating fire, the winds were so strong. You know, it's not like we could snap our fingers and say, you know, if we made the right choices five years ago in this environment, everything would have been saved, and nobody, nobody's homes would have been lost. Almost certainly, there would have been quite bad damage, but probably wouldn't have been quite as pervasive or quite as catastrophic as we've seen. And I do think, just to pause for a moment and note that that damage really is historic. I think it is going to be the most damaging destructive fire in terms of structures destroyed in California history. I think in terms of dollar totals, it'll be even more dramatic, because these are incredibly wealthy people living in quite expensive homes. Actually, many of them lost their insurance over the last year. 70% of policies were dropped by State Farm last year, which means much more of this damages on is on the going to be on the on state ledger. But just to contemplate like this, Los Angeles is a city Pacific Palisades is a dense urban neighborhood in that city, it is a kind of an idyllic, Pleasantville kind of. Guard of affluence. It is not a place that we think of as being built into the wildland in the same way that we do sometimes think of Malibu that way. It is built different. It feels different. And when you look at the satellite footage, when you look at the helicopter or drone footage, it's just been flattened.
David Sirota 10:16
The previous mayor of Los Angeles told you something a few years ago about the danger of fires. This is obviously before what you just described happened. Tell us what he told you and what you make of what he told you.
David Wallace-Wells 10:34
So, yeah, I went to LA in early 2019 I was reporting in the aftermath of some really bad fires that had taken place in 2018 so now we're talking about about six years ago, and it seemed like those fires, especially this really bad one that burned through Malibu, sort of heralded a new era of fire. And I think we've seen that play out, although the last few years, especially around Los Angeles, have not been so bad. The statewide levels across California have been, have been record setting in 2020 and 2021 and you know, we saw in Canada, really, really off the charts fires last year. But in Los Angeles, in 2019 I spoke to Eric Garcetti. And you know, i i In the piece that I ended up writing. I used his biography to illustrate a really striking trajectory for fire in the state. You know, he was not an old man, middle aged guy. The year he was born, only 60,000 acres had burned in California the year he was first elected mayor in 2013 2013 2012 now I don't remember the exact dates, but 2013 maybe it was 600,000 acres. So it was a 10 fold increase. So you just see this incredible upward trajectory over the course of a single lifetime. And oftentimes, people in California say, as you did a few minutes ago, we've always had fire here, and that's true. It is a fire prone landscape. Californians, especially in the 20th century, to some degree, make peace and it made accommodation. Of those forces tried to live amidst and around fires with some degrees of success and some degrees of unsuccess, but it was a part of the way that Californians understood their world and their their experience there. But even amidst that sort of basic familiarity, the dynamics were changing quite dramatically, so that you were seeing incredible increases, at least in the total area burned. And what Garcetti said to me, it's not something, it's not exactly, it doesn't exactly describe how I feel about the state of fire in California, but it is a really powerful story. He said there's nothing we can do. He said there's no amount of fire tankers that we can buy. There are no amount of fire engines that we can deploy. There's no amount of brush clearance that we can do that will allow us to return to the idyllic state that we imagine before these new catastrophic fires to cold. The only thing that will bring us back to that state is when the Earth and its climate system, probably, long after we're gone, relaxes into a more stable equilibrium. I'm, I'm not quoting verbatim, but that's, you know, that's the message. And on some deep level, that is true. We are in a new climate environment that is different than the one that gave rise to California. It is different than the climate environment that gave rise to Homo sapiens and human civilization. And so much of what we took for granted as being a workable compromise or equilibrium that we engineered into that landscape over the last 100 or 200 years is now up for question. Much of it has to be remodeled and reimagined redesigned. We have to protect ourselves and be much more resilient. And that's I think, where I take issue with some of what Garcetti was saying, or at least that particular sentiment, which is to say, there is still quite a lot that we can do, even acknowledging that the climate conditions are going to be are going to produce much more fire risk than our grandparents experienced in California. Well,
David Sirota 13:55
I mean, let's talk about Southern California, just as a region. It kind of seems like, if Garcetti is correct that Southern California may not be a piece of the uninhabitable earth the title of your book, it may not be uninhabitable. But is it possible that a place like Southern California is not as habitable, or really habitable for as many people who are there. I guess what I'm getting at is, are we going to have to have, I'm not even I'm not sure we can, as a society, have such conversations. But are we going to have to have conversations about whether it's logical and feasible to have so many people, and I'm somehow I'm picking on Southern California, but you know, places like Arizona and Las Vegas and these places with no water, etc, etc, I feel like this is the thing that that we're not allowed to talk about in America, that America's sovereign territory, where everybody. If the idea baked into America is you can live wherever you want, no matter how economic, ecologically absurd it is to live there. I mean, is that sustainable? Can? Can the can the climate, the new climate, sustain that level of habitability? Well, that's
David Wallace-Wells 15:16
the experiment we're running, right? And what I would say is that, at the very least, we need to be doing an awful lot more to make it workable and safe, and presumably, if we continue without taking those precautions and taking those making those adaptive interventions and investments, we're just going to be subjecting many more people to much more harm out of our own indifference or short sightedness. And you know, I think the sad thing about that short sightedness, which you could also call delusion, is that the conversation that you're saying we can have the insurance industry is actually for sure. And you know, it's remarkable actually, to compare this little period, you know, I did all this reporting in Southern California in 2019 back then, many people I spoke to would say, you know, our fire, our insurance premiums, haven't even gone up. You know you're coming here from New York. You're telling us that this is looking like an uninhabitable future to you. But you know, we've always had fire. I've lived through fires in this neighborhood before. They're tragic, but we survived, and then we rebuild. And a lot of them would say, and you know what, with this insurance money, we're going to be able to build a nicer house, a nicer house, a fancier house. It's like, you know, we've got an opportunity to do a dream home here, so long as we stay put, because the insurance payouts are more generous if you don't move. But that's all changed in the last five years, I mean, and what that means for housing patterns, and, you know, home ownership and ongoing development is, you know, a huge open question we have basically over 30 years, over 50 years, over 150 years, depending on how you want to tell the story, we've blindly assumed that when we built a house, that place was safe, and we did so, even when we restricted housing in the truly safe places, and therefore sort of pushed it into places that were really, really quite dangerous. We still assumed that, like, once you owned a pot of land, you could get insurance, and you owned your little fortress, you were going to be safe. The trees might burn. You might have to, like, you know, use a hose and put a fire out every decade or so. But basically, the thing that you had built, that home, that American dream, was going to endure, and that was a lot of it, quite delusional. And we, if we want to protect even the homes we have today, let alone build out further into the wildland urban interface, there's just an awful lot more that we need to do in terms of housing policy, zoning, building codes, and you know, all these rules and regulations for what you can do to protect your house. Now, all that sounds kind of boring. It also, on some level, sounds easy. It's like, how hard is it for people to clear five feet of a border around their house? But when you actually get down into the, you know, the nuts and bolts of it, in the brass tacks of it, people really don't like being told what to do. They think that they're much more, you know, much, much stronger and more resilient than the government tells them they are. They think the risks are much lower than they really are. They don't take seriously the warnings, even from people that tell them again and again that the risks are real. And so what you have is basic public resistance to taking precautionary action. But nevertheless, like, there's just a lot that needs to be done, which we haven't done, and that means that many, many more people are vulnerable. But I, what I, what I don't want to sound like, is like these, you know, I don't want to sound like Elon Musk here, who's saying, as he said the other day on X, like these fires are all easily preventable. It's not like we have a switch, a policy switch, and we just flick it, and there'll be no fires in California. There are always going to be fires in California under new climate conditions. They are going to be bigger, more intense and more ferocious than the ones that our parents and grandparents dealt with. But what that means is that we have to do more rather than less. We have to live more in fear of fire, rather than less in fear of fire, which is really how we've been trending over the last decade or two.
David Sirota 19:06
There are huge questions in all of this. Do we actually need more controlled fires to prevent out of control wildfires? Is climate change making America totally uninsurable? And if so, what does that mean for you, all those answers up next after the break,
after a massive fire in paradise California, then President Donald Trump, tried to shift the national conversation away from climate change and to forest management.
Donald Trump 19:41
Take care of the floors, you know, the floors of the forest very important.
You look at other countries where they do it differently, and it's a whole different story. I was with the President of Finland, and he said, we have he suggested that the wildfire threat was really about reducing the.
David Sirota 19:59
Amount of dry kindling that's accumulated in America's forests,
Donald Trump 20:04
they don't have any problem, and when it is, it's a very small problem. Some
David Sirota 20:08
have argued that America now has a so called Fire deficit, that, in essence, we don't have enough controlled fires to prevent out of control fires, like the ones seen this week in Southern California, I asked the New Yorkers Pulitzer Prize winning environmental reporter Elizabeth Colbert to explain what this argument is really all about.
Elizabeth Kolbert 20:34
Well, what's meant by fire the fire deficit is simply that, you know, in throughout history, there were, in certain landscapes, you know, fire prone landscapes like California, like Colorado, there were regular fires that were, you know, presumably in sort of pre history, started by
lightning. And we have, you know, pretty good you can look through the soil record. You can dig a soil core from the bottom of the lake or something like that, and you can find evidence of these fires. So we have a fairly good sense of how often that happened in different places. And then when people, when you know, Native Americans, were the only people in North America, they many groups used fire. They purposefully set fire to, you know, various landscapes, to for various purposes, hunting, farming, and that sort of also kept down the amount of fuel that was building up in in fire prone areas now, then, you know, fast forward to the Forest Service, the 20th century, kicking, you know, indigenous Americans off their land, taking it over, making it in many cases, federal land and The Forest Service adopts this policy in the early part of the 20th century of putting out every fire that it you know, learns about it's supposed to be put out by 10am the next morning. So fire becomes this enemy. It's suppressed whenever possible and as vigorously as possible. And many experts would say as or I think it's sort of, you know, a truth universally acknowledged that as a result of that, over the last century or so, we have built up this fire deficit. We have a lot of fuel building up in certain fire prone regions of the country that would naturally have burned. We have prevented that from happening, and as a result, you just get when you get conflagrations, there's that much more fuel to keep them going.
David Sirota 22:50
California has the most wild land urban interface housing in the entire United States. For those who don't know much about this concept of the wild land, urban interface, and why it is so related to fires, just tell us a little bit about what that term means, why perhaps we've seen so much building into a place that that seems Bucha like and beautiful, but can be very dangerous.
Elizabeth Kolbert 23:23
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a little bit of a squishy term, the wild urban interface you put on, sometimes called Wu, we, W, i is the acronym, but it basically means that you, you know, put up, and everyone, I'm sure, all of your listeners you know have seen or live in such places where you suddenly, you know, fairly rapidly, put up a housing development or even a whole community in a part of the world that maybe used to be a forest, used to be ranch land, and that brings people, and often houses. The houses are surrounded by trees. People, people like it. It's very beautiful. I mean, I've certainly seen many developments like this in my own travels through the US, um, you know, it's, it can be. They can be, you know, have wonderful views, etc, um. But the problem is, they're, you know, just surrounded by a lot of potential kindling. And when things start to go they are very difficult to protect. And so you know, certainly, people who look at fire risk would say there are a number of factors that are really increasing the risk of devastating fires these days. One of them is that more people are simply located in these places that you know should just be allowed to burn in some sense, but, but you can't, because there are people there and a lot of value and a lot of lives at stake. And the other, you know, obviously, or another, I shouldn't say the only other but and another, is that we have surprised.
Fire. And a third is that we are changing the climate. And that plays is playing a very important role in in California as fires. You know, California has had these wild swings, you know, wet, dry, wet, dry. Those are intensifying owing to climate change. So we have had a big build up of fuel again, just in a few years, and now we're having an unusually dry, hot period, corresponding to the Santa Ana winds, which California also gets pretty regularly, and that is causing extreme fire danger. And that was known. I mean, there were predictions before these fires started, we are going to see devastating wildfires. What are your takeaways when you look at what happened in in LA, beyond just it's another
David Sirota 25:49
example of the new climate reality that we're living in. I mean this, this does to me, even having lived through or lived near the boulder fire. I'm here in Denver, up in Boulder, it felt like a, you know, a Front Range event. Even having lived through that this in LA feels like something something bigger and something something different. Well,
Elizabeth Kolbert 26:12
I mean, I think one takeaway is, you know, one of the ways that this is going to really confront people, you know, there's gonna be a huge ripple effect in terms of insurance, you know, are people going to be able to and a lot of people have pointed to that as this sort of, you know, where the where, you know, climate denialism ultimately gets, you know, hung up. I mean, insurance rates are going to go up. They have been going up in California people, a lot of people lost policies. A lot of people in Pacific Palisades lost policies. Very, very rich people, you know, they just couldn't get insurance. And I think that that is going to, you know, while people are going to, you know, try to put it out of, you know, out of their minds, their rising rates or their inability to get any kind of insurance, is going to sort of keep it boiling, you know, bubbling, bubbling going along. It's not going to be something that that we can simply ignore entirely until the next disaster and how we, you know, we, I use that term loosely, how we deal with this, this problem, which is particularly acute in certain places. And I should say, you know, going, you know, also pretty acute in Colorado, increasingly acute in Colorado, in Florida, in Texas and Louisiana for flooding reasons. You know how we're going to, how people are going to deal with that, and whether we're going to, you know, have to, ultimately, you know, retreat from some of these places that are very dangerous. You know, that are just more and more dangerous in a warming world.
David Sirota 27:58
In the lead up to the Los Angeles fires, major home insurers had already been pulling out of California, and the ones that have stayed have been jacking up their premiums as one big example. NBC News reported that State Farm sent a non renewal letter to 30,000 policy holders living in areas that the company said face the biggest wildfire risks among the hardest hit areas of the policy non renewal was the west side of Los Angeles, where the fires were centered. The trend of insurers pulling out of California raises a disturbing question, are we moving towards a future in which Americans will not be able to get any insurance if they live in climate threatened locales. California's former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones told us that's exactly where things are headed, unless things change.
Dave Jones 28:57
So I believe that we are marching steadily towards an uninsurable future in the United States and across the globe, because we're not doing enough, fast enough to transition from fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emitters, which are driving the temperature rise, which is driving the climate change, which are causing the more extreme and severe weather related events, which are killing People, injuring people, destroying the whole communities and causing insurance companies to have to pay out more and more. And the way that insurance companies respond to increased losses from climate change or anything else for that matter, is two ways. One is they raise price, and the other is they limit the amount of insurance they're writing or renewing in the areas where the losses are occurring. And across the United States, insurance companies are doing exactly that with different levels of acuity based on how acute the climate driven disaster is. So things are worse, say in Florida and Louisiana the Gulf states, because hurricanes are becoming more extreme and causing greater losses. So that's causing big.
Challenges for private insurers in those states, and has been for some time. California is a little bit further back, although for some number of years now, these wildfires, which are made more severe and extreme by climate change, driving drier temperatures less precipitation, we're also having a similar insurance crisis in California, but the rest of the United States is not very far behind. New York Times did an investigative piece earlier this year found some 18 states in which insurers are both raising price and decreasing the writing of insurance because of climate driven extreme weather events landing in those states. So that's how it works, and I think the policy response across the United States and various states has been you has been to change insurance regulations so as to give insurers more rate faster. That's one response, and I think that might help in the short or mid term, keep insurers writing insurance in these places, but in the long term, we're not going to rate increase our way out of this problem, because what's happening in the background, although also in the foreground, is that temperatures are continuing to rise, causing more extreme and severe weather related events, causing more risk, causing bigger losses. And that phenomenon, which we're not doing enough to bat down, because we're not moving off of fossil fuels fast enough, that phenomenon is going to overwhelm whatever additional rates are being given to insurers to try to keep them writing in the areas where these climate driven disasters are landing. So in the short mid term, regulatory policy responses like that that California enacted recently, the insurers said, yeah, we'll start writing again with these recent fires. I think we're going to see even higher rates sought and that all may play out to see insurers begin writing again in California in the shorter midterm, but in the long term, it's going to be overwhelmed by our failure to combat the underlying cause, which is climate change.
David Sirota 31:54
What do you say to those who say the insurance situation is the market response to what is going on in the real terrestrial world, and that ultimately we are going to end up living in a country where, if you want to live in a particularly climate exposed area, and frankly, all places are climate exposed at some level, but if you want to live in a particularly Climate Exposed Area, you're either going to have to self insure, you're going to have to have no insurance, or you're going to have to pay some sky high rate of insurance. And if you don't want that, you're going to have to live in places that are less climate exposed, whether different regions of the country or different regions of particular states. In other words, is what we're seeing, the market responding to reality in a way that perhaps the political system hasn't responded to reality.
Dave Jones 32:49
Yes, I mean, I think everything you said is accurate and true. Insurance is the canary in the coal mine with regard to the climate crisis, and the canary is expiring. And so insurers are rational economic actors. They're for profit entities. They are responding to very real losses that are being driven by more extreme and severe weather related events that the climate scientists tell us are driven by climate change and only going to get worse, and that is making it increasingly challenging, if not impossible, at any price, for insurers to write insurance in certain parts of this country, and that phenomenon is only going to grow now, one policy response to that is, well, let's intervene and suppress those prices. I think that would be a bad idea, because, frankly, the one market signal we have that climate change is real and we need to do something about it is what's happening vis a vis insurance. And it's painful, no question, but hopefully it wakes policy makers up to more aggressively address the underlying cause. Second policy response is, well, let's stand up some big national scheme, taxpayer funded, of all risk, all disaster insurance, kind of like the National Flood Insurance Program on steroids. I don't think that's a great idea either, because our history of federal insurance schemes has not been a good one. Whether it's the federal crop insurance program and the National Flood Insurance Program, they tend to be super expensive. They require a lot of taxpayer assistance. They're regressive. They tend to be people that are living in low risk areas at and are poor funding insurance, in the case of the Flood Insurance Program, for people that are living in high risk areas who might be wealthier. So if you're a renter, you're paying federal taxes for flood insurance for homeowners, regressive. The other problem is that these federal schemes tend not to be risk adjusted, and so for a long time, until recently, in the National Flood Insurance Program, rates didn't reflect the actual flood risk. And so we were encouraging more development in areas we knew were going to flood by offering lesser cost flood. Insurance. And so for all those reasons, I think some national scheme of insurance is not a good way to go. However, what we do have is we have 35 states have enacted what are called fair access to insurance requirement plans. Fair plans. These are state statutorily created involuntary associations of the private insurance companies writing in the state, they're not state agencies, they're not taxpayer funded, but they're a place people can go if the private insurers decide, hey, even at the highest price, it's too risky for me to write this insurance. So you have a place to go, the way that most of the states have constructed those, I think is very wise, and that is, the private insurers still have skin in the game. So the fair plans are not state agencies, they're not insurers. They're not required to have the same reserves as an insurance company. Why? Because if they were, the rates would be even higher. Remember, they're insuring the worst risk that nobody else wants. They're not spreading the risk across anybody. So their rates are already pretty high. They had to have huge reserves. The rates being higher. Instead, what states have done is said, Look, you're still making some money writing insurance for some people in this state, and you we're not going to just let you cherry pick and throw off all the people you think are too risky and not write insurance for them and then put them in the FAIR Plan. Jones told
David Sirota 36:11
me there's one other problem at play in the insurance market. Insurers risk models aren't taking into account mitigation efforts. They're just blanket dropping policy holders, without regard for whether or not communities or individual homeowners are making investments to protect their properties from damage.
Dave Jones 36:32
There are proven, empirically proven mitigation measures that can improve the likelihood your home will survive in the event of a wildfire, in the event of a tornado, in the event of a hurricane and and some of these measures are actually have been tested by the insurers own research institute. So it's what's called home hardening in the wildfire context. You know, roofs that are impervious to fire using shadow resistant glass, so that when the heat of the fire approaches your home, the glass doesn't shatter. The Embers flow in, protecting the eaves of the attic from embers coming in defensible space, no attached, wooden structures. That's a partial list. There are similar things you can do in the wind context. There's the fortified home standard, which is all about things you can do to harden your home from wind. These things work. Then there are community and landscape scale mitigations. What am I talking about here? Well, let's talk about wildfire for for the moment, if we manage our forest the way that nature used to manage our forests, where fire was a routine part of the Western Forest Ecology, and it thinned out all the fuel, our forest would be less likely to be the subject of these major catastrophic wildfires. But instead, what we've had, we've had about 170 years of Western settlement, we had genocide against Native American peoples who used to practice cultural burning in the forest. We've had total fire suppression, and our forests have become choked with fuel. So now organizations like the Nature Conservancy and others the last two decades have proven and gotten federal government and state governments to recognize that we need to go in and actively manage the forest and remove the fuel load. Now that's not clear cutting, that's thinning, that's prescribed fire, reducing vegetation. That's also just what's called mastication, reducing the vegetation. What does that do? Reduces the fuel load, reduces the ladder. Ladder fuels that allow the fire to get from the ground up into the trees, where we have these huge complications. This stuff works. The Biden infrastructure bill had about $6 billion for all national lands to do this sort of stuff on them, some of which will land in California forest, but other Western forests and other lands as well, the state of California, under its democratic leadership, is appropriated $3.6 billion for forest treatment. Local governments are taxing themselves to do forest treatment. Homeowners association are collecting fees from homeowners force treatment, and then individual homeowners are doing home Harding and defensive space. Here's the kicker, they get no credit for that in the models that the private insurers use to decide whether they're going to write you insurance or not. That's crazy, and that needs to change. That's crazy, and insurance commissioners can't change that because they don't, don't have the authority, because the insurance industry has been very successful in every state and territory in the union, invent any laws to give insurance commissioners authority over underwriting. Insurance Commissioners authority over underwriting. They might have authority over rates, but not underwriting, not the decision to write the insurance state legislators need to change that, and it's it's technically feasible for the insurance models to account for these things. They just don't. So I'm a homeowner. I'm spending money on home hardening, I'm doing defensible space. I'm paying local taxes to do forest treatment. I'm paying state and federal tax forestry but and I'm getting no reflection of that in the models the insurers are using to decide whether to renew or write the insurance that needs to change. The insurance industry
David Sirota 39:36
itself is insuring fossil fuel projects that are making this situation worse. The insurance industry is also investing in the fossil fuel industry. And for those who don't know, when the insurance company gets your premiums, they put it all into a pull it all together and put. Into a set of investments to gain a return on those investments to then be used either for their shareholders or for payouts. The insurance industry is also investing in the fossil fuel industry itself. So I guess that's a long way of asking the question, how much is the insurance industry on the other side of the climate question? How much is the insurance industry participating in creating the climate problem that is, then on the back end, creating the insurance problem for homeowners and policy holders.
Dave Jones 40:36
There's no question that their investment in fossil fuels and their insurance of fossil fuels is contributing to our current inability to transition from fossil fuels. And so I agree that insurance companies ought to transition out of their investments in fossil fuels, and they ought to transition out of writing insurance for fossil fuels. And interestingly, the sunrise project issued a report late last year that found that the magnitude of climate driven losses is equivalent to the amount of premium that insurers are collecting from the fossil fuel industry. Now, you know, I mean, it's a it's it's an important point. I mean, it's not causation per se, right? But, but it makes the point that there really is an existential threat to the insurance industry here, vis a vis climate change, and insurers are contributing to the very set of events and losses that are making it challenging, if not impossible, in some areas, for them to write insurance. So they really need to transition, transition out of that. Now that's not gonna, that's not gonna completely solve the problem with regard to fossil fuels, but they could play a role in that transition, in encouraging that transition by getting out of this stuff. And largely they're not
David Sirota 42:01
Not surprisingly, the fires in Los Angeles are already being politicized. This Huffington Post headline summed it all up, Trump calls on Governor Newsom to resign. Republicans blame dei for inability to contain wildfires. So I asked New York Times climate reporter David Wallace wells, where does he think this all goes from here in the political arena?
David Wallace-Wells 42:28
One of the things that's like, on some level, weirdly hopeful about that otherwise quite ugly political rhetoric, is that it is conservative saying that government should be doing more to protect people from climate risk and climate disaster, right? It may reflect, you know, this, maybe in bad faith. It may just be, you know, a short term thing. When they want to, like, they want gavid News popularity to fall, who knows where they'll end up on the on the other side of things. But I actually do think, looking at the Maga coalition, the Maga culture in the Elon era, this is something that is changing more generally, which is that, you know, you used to have Ronald Reagan saying, government's always the problem. Used to have Grover NORC was saying, I want government small enough that I can struggle in a bathtub. And now with Elon, it's like his impulses are kind of certainly anti bureaucratic, to some meaningful degree, anti democratic, small d democratic, but they are also sort of pro government, like he said, he's kind of like saying, we want to unleash the spending power of government to make changes in the world. He's not just trying to reduce the footprint of, you know, of government. And I don't know exactly how that'll all shake out. It may well be that two years from now, the right wing is just as hostile to climate adaptation investment as they were two years ago. I don't want to make an optimistic prophecy here, but it also feels like a very unsteady time, and it is the case that people writing thoughtfully about the political science of climate for a long time have talked about this transition from climate skepticism to kind of eco fascism, where the right wing, having denied the problem of climate change shifts quickly to accepting it as a meaningful threat, but using it as a justification for otherwise nationalistic mercenary impulses. And we may be seeing some of that play out here, where two years ago, many of these same people now criticizing Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom would have told you, climate change isn't even a thing, and now they're saying, How dare the Democrats fail to protect us from from these challenges. And on some global level, if you're Californian, maybe that even brings about some, you know, some amount of progress, which is to say, some consensus that we just need to do more on the adaptation side, I've seen very little evidence of that to this point, and I think the country is much more vulnerable to climate disasters than I would like it to be, or that I would have hoped we could, you know, we were way behind where I hoped we would be a few years ago. But it may well be that while there hasn't been a climate awakening of the kind that you and I might have wished for five or six years ago, prompted.
About climate disaster, where everybody wants to prioritize climate action as a top shelf political priority. Nevertheless, there has been a sort of growing recognition that the risk landscape is changing, and if we are in charge at any level from any background, one of our responsibilities is to protect one another from those from the Jagger ness of that no risk landscape, and we'll see.
David Sirota 45:23
So I want to ask you, as a final question to play, put your political hat on, but in a not in a partisan way, because it segues from what you just said. We just had a national election. Two months ago, climate change and extreme weather preparedness were rarely mentioned really at all, despite
David Wallace-Wells 45:42
the fact that we had this horrible hurricane a month before the election. Yeah, right,
David Sirota 45:47
right. And voters ranked climate change low on their list of priorities. But in 2023 as an example, two and a half million Americans were displaced from their homes due to weather related disasters. That number, obviously, is only, only going to go up. So I guess, what do you think the disconnect is? What? Why are we still? Why is there still this, what I would call a democracy disconnect. And I'll throw out some theories here, just see if you have any response to them like, is it that people think it's an unfixable problem, so they're not going to list it as a priority? Is it that the problem is so perceived to be so diffuse that people have more sort of problems right in their face, affordability problems, they can't, can't afford health care, groceries, etc, etc. What are you What are you attributed to? And are you in the place where, well, it's never going to be top of mind. We've just if it's not top of mind now, it's never going to be top of mind. Or are you like, hey, it's just over the horizon. It's fine. It's soon going to be top of mind. Like, where are you on all that?
David Wallace-Wells 46:59
I think we are past a local peak of climate concern, and we're relatively far from another peak of climate concern. I think that heading into 2018, 2019, 2020, there was globally and within the US, a rising tide of climate alarm, especially on the left. That is why we got Greta. We got sunrise. We got the climate strikes. We got, you know, talk of a green New Deal. We got the European Green Deal in Europe. We got, you know, the IRA, which imperfect, but you know, a Democratic president wagering his legislative legacy on on a climate bill was a major win for the climate movement in the US. As imperfect as that bill might be, just as a political story, it was a success that we got Biden to devote that capital to that project. And I think part of the story that we've seen since then is that in the US, at least Democrats, a lot of Democrats, feel like we addressed it. It was like we didn't talk in 2012 about healthcare as, like a top priority, because we had a Democrats thought that, you know, Obamacare had solved the problem. You know, there's a lot to be unpacked there too. But I think that on the left in the US, there was a growing concern powered by a relatively widespread, I wouldn't say majority, but relatively widespread, understanding that the cost of inaction were really high and that we had done nothing about it, and the IRA, the infrastructure bill, the, you know, the green energy revolution that we're seeing unfold, all of that. All of those are signals to people who, five years ago, were really freaked out that, in fact, something is being done. Many of them know it's not enough. Many of them know that we're still falling far short of our of our climate goals. And in fact, you know, we're passing them by the day, basically. But I think that on some level, you know, focusing public policy on climate for the first time, let a little air out of the climate anxiety balloon. Globally, we're talking about a somewhat different story. But you know, generally speaking, I would say all of the things that you identified have always been problems with the cause of climate action. And on some level, you know, I don't want to be too congratulatory to the activists of the, you know, 2019, 2020, period. But on some level, when I look back at this, I think they did an amazing thing to get these politicians to be so focused on this issue, even for the amount of time that they did, there was a period of a couple of years where, like every global leader, every time they got up on stage, would be talking about climate change as an existential threat. That is the achievement of activist groups over several generations, but in a concentrated way over the last five years. And I think we have a much better energy policy around the Western world than we would have otherwise. But you know, the problem is with all political issues. Treatments, the this, these, these, you know, these investments and pieces of legislation are, you know, at least, at best, partial and in other ways, hugely problematic. And if we're happy with, you know, taking half a step towards a stable future, we're not going to continue walking in that direction all that quickly. And that, I think, is unfortunately where we are. I don't think that fires like the one that we just saw in California are going to reignite an American enthusiasm for rapid investment in cutting emissions. I think it's much likelier that they inspire much more focus on preparedness, adaptation and resilience, I would welcome that, but I'm basically myself resigned to continuing on the that we continue on the sort of shallow glide path that we're on in terms of emissions reductions, where we end up coming close to eliminating fossil fuels somewhere at the end of the century, not in the middle of the century, and pay the price for the additional global warming that that 50 year delay has baked in.
David Sirota 51:06
Like Elizabeth Colbert, I agree that we need to have serious conversations about how to live in a world that's heating up, and that'll mean needing to rethink our cities from the ground up. And that's at the heart of the second episode of our special series on the Los Angeles fires. Next week, you'll hear from Arjun Singh again, who's been doing some reporting to find out how urban design, architecture and construction will need to change to match the tragic realities of life in the new and hotter climate. Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me, David Sirota and Jared Jacang mayor, with help from Ronnie Rico Benny and Arjun Singh, editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell.