California's Wildfires Exposed Failings of the State's Leadership
The potential risks from a major wildfire have been well known for years, but there was little appetite to solve those problems before disaster struck.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic lawmakers are sure to lecture us again this session about the need to step up our efforts to combat climate change. Here's a fun fact you can use to counter them, courtesy of University of Chicago research: 2020's wildfires emitted "close to double (the state's) emissions reductions achieved over 16 years."
That's right, one wildfire year obliterated decades of costly, painstaking efforts to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. And 2020's fires were far less severe than the horrific ones we've recently witnessed in the Los Angeles area. We get wildfires nearly every year, which are constantly incinerating our climate goals. So there's no need to argue over climate science, something—if we're honest with ourselves—few of us know much about.
But any midwit can realize the state's $54 billion climate action budgets, $100-billion-plus effort to build a bullet train, and policies to outlaw internal combustion engines are for naught if it doesn't get serious about wildfire prevention. California emits an almost imperceptible amount of the Earth's emissions (thank you, India and China!), but whatever cutbacks we make are literally going up in smoke.
California should, then, follow a University of Chicago conclusion: "Wildfire emissions need to be a key part of climate policy if California is going to meet its emission reduction goals." Instead, Newsom and company use climate change as an excuse, suggesting in essence that their hands are tied until we reverse the Earth's climate trajectory.
In their view, increased heat is leading to more wildfires so the state should double down on its policies to reduce emissions. They have it roughly backward. State policymakers need to embrace policies that control wildfires, which are rendering useless our climate agenda. But to do so would expose state leaders for their incompetence.
I'm not talking about their specific reactions to the latest fires, although Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass' deer-in-the-headlights response to a reporter's questions as she exited a plane from Ghana will surely be a "what not to" example in crisis-public-relations training. I'm referring to the confluence of years-in-the-making California policies that have exacerbated the wildfires and the state's response to them.
First, the Newsom administration has talked on occasion about the need to step up brush clearance to remove the tinder. True to form, he hasn't done much about it other than earmark some dollars. The state clears maybe 125,000 acres of brush from its 19 million acres of forest (plus another 14 million that are federally owned). The state requires multiple lengthy approvals for forest-clearing projects and impedes property owners who want to fire-harden their homes.
Second, the state shrugs at its water problems. Water is only tangentially related to the fires, but had it built additional reservoirs to trap more water during storm years it might have kept the hydrants from running dry. The California Coastal Commission rejected a privately funded desalination plant in Orange County. Newsom continues to delay on water infrastructure projects. His anti-fossil-fuel campaign makes it tough for water districts to get generator permits to help move water around.
The LA nightmare also raised an issue involving something homeowners desperately need but rarely think about: insurance. In 1988, California voters approved Proposition 103, which created a prior approval system whereby the insurance commissioner (which then became an elected position) had to approve rate changes. Elected officials typically campaign to "protect" consumers and the rate-review process morphed into a long, bureaucratic process.
Over decades, insurers were unable to adjust prices to reflect their risks, so they quietly (and then not-so-quietly) exited the state rather than expose shareholders to uncontrollable exposure. Even after this turned into a crisis several years ago, state officials slow-walked some solid reforms that finally let insurers use forward-looking catastrophe models.
They went into effect right before the fires hit, so all bets are off whether they're enough to save the system. Meanwhile, the state-created insurer of last resort, the FAIR (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements) Plan is overburdened and could collapse. These are self-inflicted problems that Newsom and legislators have known about for years.
A quick note about firefighting budgets, which now are under the microscope. No one wants to criticize firefighters so most analysts neglect eye-popping salaries earned by these LA-area public employees. You'll see plenty of annual compensation packages above a half-million dollars, and one as high as $900,000. If agencies based pay on market conditions rather than union power, they could obviously hire more firefighters.
Finally, the fires reinforced the difficulty in building—or rebuilding—anything in this state. Newsom was right to suspend California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and Coastal Act rules, but he knows these rules impede everything and have done so for decades.
Why has there been no appetite for fixing these problems before disaster strikes? In fact, why hasn't the state dealt with any of these festering problems? That's the $150 billion question.
This column was first published in The Orange County Register.
