The Case for Letting Malibu Burn (1995)

Agreed on this point, I don't want to be subsidizing insurance or paying for multi millionaires homes to be rebuilt.

I truly feel bad for the people who lost their homes, it's awful. But it shouldn't be the tax payer who picks up the tab. If insurance is so prohibitively expensive you can no longer afford to build there, then so be it - you can't afford to live there after all.

Sure, the point of insurance is that the many subsidize the few.

But I expect there comes a point where insurance companies say "enough is enough".

Perhaps federal and state money will start to pay out, but the land gets bought as well.

It seems like the destruction is not rotating through all miles equally though.

It sure seems like the folks in Florida are rebuilding more often than most.

California has a more stringent wildlands fire building code. Not sure if they'd apply it to this area too. I've also heard that some insurances have declined fire coverage or charged very high premiums to homes not meeting their material requirements.

i have been wondering about this. how well do concrete and other less flammable materials actually help in a fire storm like this? wouldn't much of the house still get damaged enough that you may well have to rebuild anyways? or is the difference enough to keep, say, 50% of the houses in a reusable state as opposed to losing all of them?

That's definitely the case in Altadena which is a historically minority neighborhood. The cities south of Altadena like Pasadena and South Pasadena were redlined by real estate agents for decades after desegregation, which forced African Americans and Latinos to settle the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains at that wildland-urban boundary. Lots of people lost homes that have been in their families since the 60s and 70s.

Who knows? If not for those policies, Pasadena could have been built denser and Altadena could have been miles of flat natural reserve that acts as a large firebreak where firefighters can easily fight the flames before they threaten thousands of structures, with frequent prescribed burns to keep the fuel load down.

That's probably the real kind of conversation we should be having of municipalities easing housing restrictions to build denser and the state buying up large swathes of these wildland adjacent communities to create larger breaks between the hills and the houses.

No doubt. As I said, the homing instinct is strong. We build in risky areas because we've lived there all our lives.

Perhaps we should build different though to mitigate risk. It's not hard to build a fire-proof house. Or one that's flood resistant. Or hurricane proof...

Yes there are many. One of the strategies for dealing with the upcoming climate catastrophe has to be to do a sober assessment of its impact and instrument societies to relocate quickly. There is simply no point in trying to rebuild in areas that will be constantly destroyed by natural disasters on a regular cadence.

Very safe in most of Europe. In the UK the only weather that kills people is the cold (pensioners who can't afford heating; I wouldn't say it's exactly natural causes, but it's in the vicinity) and floods, which occasionally kill single digits of people.

There are basically no earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, wildfire, etc. I would imagine a lot of places are like that.

https://firststreet.org/ will report climate risk, for a given address. I live in a part of the Bay Area with the following risk factor profile:

1/10 Flood. 1/10 Fire. 1/10 Wind. 7/10 Air. 3/10 Heat.

Seems manageable. Of course, earthquakes are not climate-related.

I’ve been to places in the Phillipines where everyone expects their house be destroyed and rebuilt, after typhoons, at least 20 times in their lifetimes.

[edit: typos]

UK is pretty benign. We occasionally get some mild "extremes" (for us) that people are not prepared for, but nothing major.

You mean like, Wisconsin?

London doesn't have earthquakes. Masonry is a death trap.

The Great Fire of London put a stop to wooden houses in the UK. Maybe the same will happen in California now.

But having seen the pictures from social media of the torrent of embers, maybe a few more homes might have survived but probably not many (unless they concreted their gardens too).

Let’s start with 1978 Prop 13 and end their property tax subsidies though. Go look up how much the owners of these eight-figure properties paid in taxes over the past five decades.

https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/map only has it for the Bay Area, but Zillow and the county tax assessor websites can show for any address — it’s public record.

I live in the Netherlands. My insurance already doesn't cover a flood (it also doesn't cover war or a nuclear reactor blowing up).

It is the government that picks up the bill in real disasters I suggest everyone reads the fine print on their contracts.

How can there be price controls on insurance? The state subsidizes insurance in these areas?

Yeah, the solution isn’t divorcing risk (as communicated by cost) from reality. If the concern is usurious insurance rates, that’s where things like profit caps and other regulations come in. Society should want people to have fair insurance rates but not necessarily cheap rates.

Really hard to make the argument for this politically when the state is also facing a housing crisis. Unfortunately, a lot of undeveloped land is also prone to wildfire. The solution is zoning relaxation and building dense but there's also a lot of resistance to that.

I think that assumption is inaccurate:

1. In parts of the Pacific Palisades/Malibu, as the article points out, yes, there are firestorms that are going to happen there pretty much inevitably. But even then, if you look at some places that had both the money and motivation to really invest in fire prevention (e.g. the Getty Villa), they escaped the worst of the damage - no structures in the Getty Villa, smack dab in the middle of the Palisades, burned.

2. What happened in Altadena was entirely different. It shouldn't go unnoticed that in many pictures and videos that lots of trees are still standing unscathed while the homes are all burnt to the ground. Most of these homes went up long before adequate fire protection was deemed a necessity, and given land values there now (even with it being in the state it's in), it should be possible to rebuild in a much more fire resistant state than what existed previously.

It will get worse no matter what. Even if we went carbon-negative tomorrow, California in currently in a historically wet period. The music will stop no matter what, unless we acquire planetary weather control.

> Across the Californian region, paleoclimate records dating back more than 1,000 years show more significant dry periods compared to the latest century. Ancient data reveals two mega-droughts that endured for well over a century, one lasting 220 years and one for 140 years. The 20th century was fraught with numerous droughts, yet this era could be considered relatively "wet" compared against an expansive 3,500 year history. In recent times, droughts lasting five to 10 years have raised concern, but are not anomalous. Rather, decade long droughts are an ordinary feature of the state's innate climate. Based on scientific evidence, dry spells as severe as the mega-droughts detected from the distant past are likely to recur, even in absence of anthropogenic climate change.

I say this because people should not confuse the issues. Fighting climate change won't stop California from burning. This was always going to happen; even in the best-case massively carbon-negative future, we at best defer the burning a few years. So we shouldn't have the attitude "California will just be OK if we can go carbon negative." It won't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California

Simplest answer is cut down all the trees and pave it over. No fuel no fire.

Metal. Stone. Concrete.

If the only people we can find who are 'mad' are al gore and leo dicaprio, I'd suggest we have a selection problem. There are plenty of monks, ascetics, lawyers, product managers, entrepreneurs, bankers and trad wives who care and are doing quite a lot more than the average person.

Bad actors, uncommitted actors does not actually change the problem's existence. In an adjacent example consider here in LA. Before the fires, corruption in the homes for the homeless got some decent air. It does not actually change the need for homes for the homeless. Its been poorly implemented and allowed to be exploited. That doesn't mean the homeless should get shafted.

Here the question is quite literally about humanity. If one cannot connect with that, maybe they can connect with the need for a stable population that creates new workers and funds said person's retirement.

What is being preached about is that the way things are going will lead to larger, more unpredicted/out of cycle natural disasters. We are seeing that. Globally. We will all pay, whether its together and preventatively or independently one by one. History shows we do better when we're together.

> I don't think environmental activists realize the damage they do to their case by not living by what they preach relentlessly about.

The ones who do that probably don’t care about their cause so much as having a cause.

Ah, the millennia old argument of "you cannot successfully proselytize donating money to the poor unless you live like a monk yourself".

Eh, as someone who’s been vegan for a couple decades, ascetic for a solid chunk of that time, and active in various other ways to greater or lesser degrees, people will still shut down mentally when they don’t have the hypocrisy lever to pull.

People in the reactionary/denialist/antagonistic camp will just end with “okay yeah you’re right but I’m not changing/I don’t actually care/I accept that I do evil and shrug”.

People looking to inspire positive change being required to be perfect saints lest they and their movements be condemned seems like a hint that human psychology is not tuned to rise to this occasion.

That expectation of perfection is unrealistic. Humans are messy and bound to be hypocritical in countless ways.

The CEO of Phillip Morris may volunteer at the local children’s hospital and feed the homeless on weekends.

Yet his hypocrisy in doing good in his personal life while doing so much harm in his professional life doesn’t seem to interfere with his ability to do harm, in fact it likely helps.

The executive director of the nonprofit children’s hospital going out on weekends and beating stray dogs to death with a pipe, well his hypocrisy may very well end his ability to do good in his personal life.

It seems like we’re just destined to let people who do bad things without any pretense of doing good off the hook, while crucifying anyone who dares try to do a moral good who isn’t somehow perfectly aligned in their lifestyle, ideology, and entire life history. Despite the fact that the former may represent a large net negative to our world and the latter may represent a net positive.

TLDR: Even if the climate activists weren’t hypocrites, your friends would likely be no closer to embracing the terrible reality of climate change and the necessity of painful sacrifice to address it.

I nitpick about little things like accuracy in scientific studies (hear: blatant bias, even admitted by the authors), and only one side of the opinion being funded for studies and not the others.

I myself used to be a staunch vegan, surrounded by friends who planned not to have kids. Well, they have kids now. That triggered my will to study the original documents and find a movement that is fundamentally dishonest.

The worst angst I have is, what if they were dishonest and still right. That would be terrible.

Thanks for that link. The data also shows that, over a longer (millennia) timescale, California is currently in a wet period.

Context is very important. Climate change is a critical issue, but solving it doesn't help California stop burning.

This. Fire is an integral part of CA ecosystems and the native plant communities are dependent upon it. It does burn more frequently thanks to man, but citing climate change as a reason for the fires only makes you sound smart to the ill-informed.

Chapter 7 addresses both interior and exterior fires. Exterior fires are a danger to buildings everywhere (see: Great Chicago Fire).

It is never really that simple. Here is a thought experiment:

How does the idea of defensible space work if your neighbor's walls are 5 feet from your walls? What happens when an entire neighborhood is that closely spaced? How do you retrofit the space between buildings?

There are dozens of challenges like the above, and a lot of them delve into personal freedoms. Should you be able to choose what trees to plant on your property? Should you be allowed a shed? Should the government use air surveillance to enforce the cleanliness of your backyard?

There's lots we can do, lots we should do, but it is far from a simple path with a singular solution.

Technically, but nothing miles away caught on fire. The ignition zone is likely only a few hundred yards even in intense Santa Ana winds. So that means only homes in fire prone areas (or adjacent) would need to be made very defensible.

Probably a more pertinent question would be: can you construct houses that would not burn in a Santa Ana if all the vegetation and landscaping nearby burned.

If you have fire resistant structures and only vegetation burned, not any structures, it would be much less expensive to replace just the landscaping plants.

In a 80 mph wind, it would be very challenging to design a structure that would survive a wooden house burning next door.

Does anyone know if the insurance companies gave discounts to houses that had fire resistant improvements, in the areas that burned in these fires?

They'll need to manage the underbrush better, regardless of how much of an effect was due to climate change. People are going to live there and need to take protective measures. Climate change only increases the amount of management required.