The case for letting Malibu burn (1995)

Are you subsidizing them, though? High-risk areas often require expensive insurance addendums or proof of self-insurance. We deal with this in Houston and our numerous pockets of 100yr floodplains.

>But it shouldn't be the tax payer who picks up the tab.

Rebuilding is exactly what paying taxes are for. We've been giving too much of it to corporate interests, why not give some to the citizens? What are we, nodes of the Matrix, supplying the machine with labor for nothing but an illusion of a decent life?

> paying for multi millionaires homes

Keep in mind that for many expensive homes, much of the expense is in the location, and not the home itself. It doesn't cost the market value of the house to rebuild it on the same spot. It's also not free, and in mass disasters it can be more because of shortages, but it's still less, often significantly so, than the market value.

This strikes me as not understanding the limits of private insurance. There wouldn’t be earthquake insurance across much of California if the state didn’t provide it. Private insurance isn’t generally able to withstand large calamities which result in many thousands of high dollar claims in a short period of time.

Getting insurance is a making a bet bad stuff happens. The insurer makes a bet it doesn’t happen when it signs an agreement with you. If the bet is obviously negative expected value, it stops being a useful subsidy and it becomes instead throwing good money away.

That is not in fact the point of insurance.

The insurance companies did say "enough is enough", which is why the FAIR plans exist - i.e. https://www.cfpnet.com/

>Funny enough it's also the only place in Europe that takes floods seriously.

I'm guessing Belgium simply because they broke the dikes during WWI to flood the land with seawater to delay the German advance.

Florida is many hundreds if not thousands of miles of coastline. The vast majority of it hasn’t been impacted majorly (defined as more than a tropical storm and evacuation) in many decades.

My family has been there since the 50s and has never had major damage to any home. There’s some work and minor damage involved with tropical storms but nothing like a full on flood or total loss of house like these fires.

It’s just not true at all to say that most of Florida is regularly majorly impacted.

Florida is a huge place. Hurricanes are enormous but the part that does serious damage is pretty small. Most Floridians have been through a hurricane. Few have had to rebuild after one. A major hurricane that hits the state is going to destroy some houses but not a particularly large fraction of all the houses in the state.

Similarly, tornado alley seems tremendously destructive, but the breadth of the destruction is small. The average interval between house-destroying tornadoes at any given point is hundreds if not thousands of years

Concrete is nice if you don’t want the whole house to burn down, it’s required in some places. Also, some minimum distance between buildings and regulations about what you can plant in the yard. There are folks who’ll say it’s taking away their freedoms and they’re actually right, it’s just we don’t want to pay for an army firefighters for when their respecting their freedoms puts the neighborhood in danger. (I’ve got nothing against firefighters - but if they aren’t needed as much, they can be not firefighters and contribute in a different way.)

I've been wondering how fire manages to damage a stucco/stone house in the first place, especially in some of the cases where there wasn't much vegetation around. The scale of the fire must be quite immense and counterintuitive to get the outcome seen on news photos/footage.

Floods do a lot of damage. Some areas, esp around the M5, are becoming uninsurable. Flash flooding is increasing and the UK doesn't have the infrastructure to deal with it. There's also the issue of food security, because climate change is very obviously affecting crop yields.

If the AMOC flips the UK and Europe will have a completely different, far less hospitable landscape.

Meanwhile in the Med increasing temps are making extreme flash floods much more likely (Valencia, for example) and fires are becoming more common in drier areas, like Greece.

I hear about the heat in Spain/France/Italy causing a lot of deaths of elderly people.

I live in southern Ontario which is mostly like this too. There is occasional flooding but minor compared to other places, and occasional major snowstorms, but the worst natural disaster I can recall in a half century here was an “ice storm” that caused damage that was quite frankly small potatoes compared to hurricanes and earthquakes.

Living next to the Great Lakes also means that regardless of what happens with droughts, we have a supply of fresh water that is virtually limitless. I have to wonder whether the region will start to become more popular with climate refugees. Might Chicago become more of a destination, for example?

Unless you build in a flood zone (europe has those too BTW) most of the US is not subject to those things.

Yeah, central Europe, probably also Eastern, just stay out of River banks or build with sufficient foundations, debris-catchers, and nothing vulnerable below the first above-ground floor. Yes, this includes making sure the interior walls down there are fine from soaking 24 hours. And no electricity for a week after that.

The reason being that you want to rely on your home after such a disaster, if you get hit.

> Very safe in most of Europe.

Fires in the Mediterranean region are a serious thing. I got evacuated once from our family house once: flames 20 meters high near the house.

I can't think of any. Some are less than other but there is always something. Lightning is a common one

Well given that intense heat wave that hit the UK a couple summers ago where the country went from green to brown from space, I’d worry about forest fires

Let's hope it lasts: https://www.ft.com/content/7711109e-0338-43ad-aada-853f058a2...

The Pacific Northwest is pretty mild. But there are the volcanoes!

The odds of the UK experiencing 40°c heat in the next 50 years were put at 0.02% a few years ago. It happened the following year.

Those stats are meaningless. 1/10 just means unlikely but the dice could still land that way.

I don't know, seems incomplete even for climate stuff. It shows some front range locations in CO as having no real risks, but there's no category for hail, which is a regular and very serious climate and weather related problem.

Plenty of tornados, cold, or lightning there.

Here is a screenshot of Pacific Palisades property taxes https://imgur.com/a/1G6pLap

More exploration can be done here https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/#34.04626347956...

Government doesn't pick up bills, taxpayers do. And it introduces moral hazard when the people engaging in risky behaviors (buying homes in high fire-risk areas) don't bear the costs of those risks.

This creates larger, systemic risks and is simply unfair. Someone in Montana should not have to pay to rebuild homes in California.

The California Department of Insurance regulates the insurance rates, down to how much they can raise them each year. Over the last decade the real risk of these fires has become better known to insurance companies and they've been screaming to be allowed to raise rates faster. Some have even exited the state completely (to new sign ups).

CalFAIR is the state insurer of last resort but last I checked it's not subsidized. There were talks of needing a possible bailout last year, and it's going to intensify now, but it hasn't happened yet.

Newsom is proposing waiving CEQA for rebuilding destroyed homes in the wildfire zone, but only for low-density structures, which makes me want to scream until my throat bleeds. California infallibly manages to zero in on the worst possible solution; waive CEQA either entirely or not at all, and let the Palisades homeowners wait for their decade of environmental review like the rest of us have to.

Profit caps are a bad idea in general, but they are an especially terrible fit for companies insuring against tail risks, because you need to eke out a small profit for years or decades to hedge against the black swans with massive costs. The 2017 and 2018 wildfires wiped out _25 years_ of insurance company profits, for example: if you had said in 2013, "hey, these guys have made 20 straight years of profits, we need caps to control costs", you'd have left them insolvent against the fires.

This is all a moot point though: you cannot force companies to offer insurance. If regulations prevent them from offering policies at a profit, they just leave. Which is exactly what is happening in California (and Florida): every company is bailing out and refusing to renew policies.

Shouldn't competition take care of usurious rates in relatively free and working market? That is people will move to cheaper offerings which likely are close to real price.

It's the water that allows the fuel build up though.

So a drier California might actually not burn as much, because, as the article points out, there's not much to burn in a desert ?

Also, this being more about human behavior, people might be much less interested to build in a desert (in this case, I doubt it, see also : Saudi Arabia). (Up to a point of course, worst case climate change scenarios involving these latitudes becoming uninhabitable in the next centuries.)

Otherwise, I was wondering whether, under a still "wet" California, but under still mild climate change, the more frequent both rains and droughts, might increase the frequency of firestorms just high enough so that humans actually start taking them seriously.

(EDIT : And looks like they already did, if those 2007 building code changes aren't just for show ? How is the correlation between the post-2007 buildings and those that survived firestorms?)

> "Citing the hypocrisy of some messengers as a reason not to care or do anything just means someone really wants an excuse not to care or do anything anyway."

This is not quite the perspective. The issue is that if humans were to shift the climate in a targeted action, it would require an absolutely massive and concerted global effort - something's not only unlike anything else that's ever happened in history, but whose feasibility is strongly contradicted by just about everything in history, and present.

So when even the people that claim to care more than anything else about climate can't really be bothered to live these efforts, what are the chances of people who don't care, are antagonistic, and then let alone with geopolitics entering the picture - actually acting? The answer is, realistically, zero, which means it's necessary to look for different solutions. It's not an excuse to not care, but rather strongly suggestive that caring, in the ways proposed, is not going to be effective.

You know some weird analogy is that it's like teaching kids about sexual abstinence as opposed to teaching them how to use a condom. The first is what you want and it feels good and morally upstanding to go that route, but it's also just not realistic. The latter feels questionable and like it may even be encouraging undesired behavior, but it's also realistic about what's going to happen anyhow.

More like the decades old argument that if you keep getting caught fucking men in toilet stalls being gay can't be all that bad.

I am very in favor of climate change mitigations through careful legislation and believe we are doing nowhere near enough. But I think a closer analogy is "proselytizing donating money without donating any money yourself" or in the extreme of making the problem worse -- "proselytizing donating money while robbing from the poor." That proselytizing while making the problem worse is more a problem with the proselytizer than the critic. But the worst of all is making it worse and actively fighting against remediation.

Historically, we do have examples of it working though :

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-chr...

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-early-christian-strateg...

Though in our case it's a much harder issue :

How do you make and keep a powerful polity while staying militarily weak ? (Tanks / planes / nukes not being an option in a society that decided to de-industrialize.)

This also involves population : a post-industrial society, is likely to have its military strength based on population (like pre-industrial societies did, where agriculturalists overwhelmed hunter-gatherers) : how do you keep your population low without becoming weak ?

(Christian polities didn't exactly stay meek, more like the opposite (after a while)...)

At least values can be transmitted memetically, without genetical lineage, so keeping a stable national population is probably the least unworkable issue as long as immigration and assimilation are high enough...

Perfectly put. Personally I am quite amazed at people who think this way. This is not adult level reasoning. It’s not something that will change by setting an example.

I just fear that large swathes of society are completely oblivious to what it means to live in a liberal civil society and how changes gets affected. The expectation of perfection seems like a result of being unfamiliar/unrealistic.

California leaving a wet period will make it burn less.

The problem isn't a lack of water. It's that we get a ton of water for a year or two. A bunch of stuff grows. Then we get no water for many years. All that stuff that grew in the wet years dries out. Eventually it burns.

If we just enter a dry period, there is only 1 step: no water, nothing grows. No more fires.

> What climate change changes is the frequency.

Where is the data you used to support that claim?

And, what is this "climate change" thing anyway. The climate has been changing since this planet was formed. So, yeah, climate is a part of the reality of living on this planet. And that's news, how?

You see, that's the problem with this issue. Of course climate change is real. Who would dispute that fact? What isn't real is instantly attributing EVERYTHING to climate change. Every fire we ever have in California is instantly attributed to climate change, and this is spoken as indisputable truth that nobody should dare doubt. Like fires materialize out of nowhere due to molecular alchemy caused by climate change. This is pure unadulterated insanity.

When someone says "it's climate change" we are all supposed to kneel down, bow our collective heads and accept it as the truth. Well, I call on Zeus then. Why not? Who is going to dispute that the fires and your reef example were not caused by Zeus being angry at us? Prove me wrong.

You know what was needed to prevent this disaster? Simple:

  Water: Reservoirs were EMPTY due to political decisions
  Funding: The fire department has been shrinking for many years.
           During that time the city has grown.
           And, during that time, they have been asking for more funding.
           Instead they got budget cuts and less fire stations.
  Execution: Companies who hire incompetent people fail.
             The same is true of government.
             People have been voting for the incompetent, and this is
             the result.
  Maintenance: The only vegetation control we have is when a wild fire
               burns down entire hills. If we don't control the fuel
               the results are predictable.
  Enforcement: People must be responsible for hardening their property
               against fires.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flame...

https://nbcmontana.com/news/nation-world/los-angeles-water-c...

Climate change?

The other day there was an interview with the Chief of the fire department. They printed and displayed, on a table, some thirty different documents (if not more) from the last several years. These documents show how they have been asking for help and got nothing at all.

Climate change?

There's an interview with a guy who saved his home and those of two of his neighbors...using a garden hose. Sure, a bit of luck had to play a part here. However, one thing he said during the interview is endemic to aspects of this event: He said that in the time he spent fighting the fires he never saw a single fire brigade come by to protect any of the surrounding homes. Not one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYQlnHdMqC0

Climate change?

> Climate change has made the frequency of these disasters increase.

And, out of the million other variables driving planetary forces, not a single one plays part on any of these events. It is decreed that it this is due to a single variable, climate change. Time to kneel down and accept it.

We cannot do a damn thing about climate change. Not one thing. The hubris in this religion is incredible. People are walking around talking about this like controlling a planetary scale effect is actually something we can do. It's madness.

I mean, the LA fires this week, when compared to planetary scale, were utterly insignificant in scale. A planetary rounding error. And we had no power when facing such a thing, while, in the same breath, people are saying things like "We have to control climate change!". The only reason we had some control is because the winds stopped for a couple of days.

Have we gone mad?

The planet has always changed, evolved and mutated. And we learned to live on it. It --the planet-- sets the rules. We have to live within them. If things are changing, we adapt. It isn't apocalyptic. It's just change. We can't fix it. Now, that would require Zeus.

Yeah, but the external shit is basically "if it's wood, is it treated with fire retardant". It's not like vinyl siding is great for fires.

Townhouses with no intervening space would likely be an improvement. Browse Altadena in streetview and you'll see loads of houses with vegetation -- tinder -- stacked between them. Getting rid of those intervening spaces entirely would reduce the surface area exposed to embers while simultaneously depriving homeowners the temptation to store fuel in unwise places.

"Technically, but nothing miles away caught on fire. The ignition zone is likely only a few hundred yards even in intense Santa Ana winds."

Not true. Here in Riverside we were watching large still-lit embers floating in (some which caused a repeat fire in the riverbottoms north of the 60, first called Brown then called Holly.) The primary stopping zone currently is around Pomona but another hard uptick in wind and it can easily cover out to the badlands.

These winds are absolutely insane, you just do not understand. When they were peaking on Wednesday morning, my Subaru was being blown almost out of lane while driving down the 91 to work.

Can’t speak for every insurer but CalFAIR does. There’s been a large push to have homeowners install those improvements over the last five years but they’re relatively minor like clearing brush around the house and installing vulcan vents. They don’t give a big enough discount to justify the expensive improvements that would really help in this Altadena fire like installing concrete tile roof, stucco exterior, or an exterior sprinkler systems. That kind of retrofit would probably cost at least $100k for an old house like most of the ones up there. The minor measures don’t help in a freak event like these Santa Ana winds.