Factually! with Adam Conover - Who’s Really to Blame for the LA Fires

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!) The Los Angeles fires were not preventable, virtually nothing could have been done to prevent the devastation. While it's natural for people to seek someone or something to blame—often focusing on the response to the fire—the truth is that the root cause runs so much deeper than that.Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. So a few weeks ago, I had the unique experience of sitting in my own living room and watching my city burn down around me. The largest fires in the history of Los Angeles swept through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, two beautiful neighborhoods that now simply are not there anymore. Eighty thousand people evacuated. A close friend of mine evacuated to my home, and I packed a go bag.

Oh, by the way, let me just say, if you ever are in a disaster scenario, try to pack your go bag early in the day. Don't do what I did and wait until like 10 p.m. to stuff a t-shirt and a couple hard drives into a knapsack. Like, get that shit done in time. So we sat there and we watched literal fire tornadoes rip through the sky on the news.

The next day when I woke up and the sun was shining again, there was ash all over my driveway. The remains of tens of thousands of real people's homes that were burned to the ground. Some of my close friends lost everything in these fires. And now all of us in LA, we're trying to pick up the pieces. We're donating to GoFundMe, we're buying air purifiers, we're dropping off clothes to donation centers

that are telling us we don't need any more clothes, please donate money instead. We're doing our best. And we're also all trying to figure out how the fuck did this happen and how do we stop it from happening again? And that's been difficult because there's a lot of bullsh-t out there right now.

As inspiring as it's been to see my city pulled together and support each other. And it really has been. It has made me love Los Angeles deeply. It has also been beyond terrifying to watch the disinformation machine spin up in real time and watch conspiracy theories and rumors and lies fly about these fires and what caused them.

In a time of crisis like this, it's essential that we get real information about what happened and how we can stop it from happening again. Which is why it has been f***ing disgusting to watch political hacks on the news use these fires that killed people and destroyed homes for nothing more than attacking their enemies,

the people in politics they don't like. Like, look at f***ing Jesse Waters from Fox News, whose theory apparently is that LA burned down because of woke. This right here, ladies and gentlemen, this is the leadership of the LA Fire Department. I sure hope they know what they're doing. Know what they're doing? Jesse, lesbians are the most competent sexuality. That's why they're first in the acronym.

They lead the way. I mean, when it's life or death out there, is there anyone more qualified to command an army of squirters? And then there was our new president, who played the flame blame game by pinning it on a helpless little fish. You'd have tremendous water up there. They sent it out to the Pacific because they're trying to protect a tiny little fish, which is in other areas, by the way, called a smelt.

Oh, I get it. Trump's going with the classic smelt it, dealt it explanation. Man, he really does think like a middle school bully, doesn't he? Well, unfortunately, he's also as dumb as one, because there was no lack of water. In fact, California's reservoirs were topped off after two years of rain. Aha! But then why, Elon Musk wants to know, were the fire hydrants not able to supply enough water? Elon's theory is that this was because of the big bad government's red tape. Yes, if only the Santa Ana winds had listened to laissez faire economist Milton Friedman,

the Palisades would still be standing. Elon was so excited to prove his little theory that he asked a real-life firefighter about it, just like a big boy. All right, what about water availability? So there was water we have several reservoirs. Just an example if we have one building burning we could flow a thousand gallons a minute on that one building so the amount of water we're flowing there really is no water system that's going to keep that pace. That's right Elon the hydrants ran dry for the same reason your

water pressure drops when someone starts the dishwasher while you take a Elon. The hydrants ran dry for the same reason your water pressure drops when someone starts the dishwasher while you take a shower. The system only has so much throughput and hydrants are built to fight one house on fire, not 500. That's how water works, buddy. I guess it's not surprising you don't understand how it works underground though.

After all, you're the guy who thought he could solve LA traffic by building infinity tunnels. Ooh, maybe you could ask a real life traffic engineer how that one would work, Ewan. Third up in the dumbass billionaire talking out of his ass club was LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shong, who said that the fires were caused because LA Mayor Karen Bass cut $23 million

from the LA Fire Department's budget. And in this case, even Patrick's own f***ing newspaper said that he was full of s***. The boring truth, if you're interested in the details of municipal budgets, is that yes, some vacant personnel positions were cut, but the overall LAFD budget actually went up because the mayor gave all of the existing firefighters raises. Now, you can argue about whether or not that's good budgetary policy. The commissioner of the LAFD thinks it isn't. But the truth is that, cuts or not, the amount of money devoted to fighting

fire in Los Angeles and Southern California more generally is so massive, these cuts would barely be a drop in the budget. The Los Angeles Fire Department has nearly 4,000 employees and a budget of $850 million. But they're just one small part of California's firefighting force. There's the LA County Fire Department with a staff of 5,000 and a budget of 1.4 billion. Then on top of that, there's the state firefighting agency, CAL FIRE,

which has a staff of nearly 13,000 and a budget of 4 billion. And that budget has doubled in recent years. It's basically an entire firefighting army. The money we spend on forest management, by the way, has also gone up more than 10 times in the same period. And this isn't even counting the firefighting forces from other parts of California, other states, and even Mexico who arrived to help through mutual aid agreements.

That means that California literally has the largest firefighting force on the planet. So the state was prepared. We did see the fire coming. We threw everything we had at it. And we were still no match for it. So again, we have to ask the question, why and who is to blame? Well, the answer isn't some easy bullsh** like a fish or a fraction of funding. It's that the people who run our society, our city, our state, and our country built it in such a way as to make fires exactly like these inevitable and unstoppable.

And that means that yes, you should be angry at our politicians, but not for the reasons the idiot talking heads say. You should be angry because these people upheld a status quo that has slow-walked us into disaster, rather than leading us to the fundamental changes we need to make to save our city. And in this video, I'm going to explain exactly what those changes are. We're going to talk about why LA is constantly on fire, according to the actual scientists who know, and we're going to talk about what we can actually do about it. But first, real quick, normally this is the part

where I ask you to support the channel on Patreon and come see me do stand up on the road. Today though, I'd like to ask you to support the victims of these fires. If you go to givedirectly.org slash L.A. fires, you can send cash directly to low income residents of the fire zones that need your help. Donating to individual fundraisers like GoFundMe is great,

but there are a lot of folks out there who need help and can't access that kind of fundraiser because they don't have the network that some of those other people do. These funds will help those people specifically. So I really hope you'll send some support to families in need. Head to givedirectly.org slash L.A. fires.

By the way, if you wanna cut through the partisan misinformation and get actual information about this huge disaster that hurt people, I really suggest you check out our sponsor, Ground News. They rate every single news source by how biased it is on the left and the right. And you can use that to see that the two different sides are having completely different conversations

about these fires. The right is blaming completely different people from the left. On the right it's all newsome, newsome, newsome. On the left it's all budget cuts, budget cuts, budget cuts. But you can also use ground news to see which sources have the highest factuality rating to make sure that you are always getting the real news

and getting rid of the spin. So if that sounds good, if you like that idea, head to groundnews.com slash factually. You can get 40% off using our special code, factually, that's groundnews.com slash factually. So the really difficult truth about these fires is that they were so intense, the winds were so strong on that day that almost no amount of preparation

would have made them survivable. You know, we like to have this belief about the world that there is always somebody in power who can come rescue us, and sometimes that is just not the case. And that's terrifying, but it's true. The most effective way to fight wildfires like these is by dropping water from the air. But on that day, LA was hit by hurricane-force winds that made takeoff impossible for planes that had to fly at that low of an altitude. You know, last week we had the climate scientist Daniel Swain on the show,

and he told me that the wind on that day was so powerful that there is footage of the fire spreading hundreds of feet in just five or ten minutes, faster than humans can reach the fire. It almost looked like a flow of lava heading down the side of a mountain. And once that flow reached the city below, it became a literal firestorm. Almost a blizzard of embers in every direction that set fire to every structure in the affected area almost simultaneously. That means that even if LA had had hundreds of additional water dropping planes and thousands of additional fire engines pre-positioned just so, it's not clear that it would have done much good on that particular day because the fire was simply that fast,

that intense, and that omnipresent. And the thing you really have to understand is that the Los Angeles area was designed by nature itself to do exactly this. Its ecology is literally built to burn and burn big every few decades. LA's wild ecosystem is made up of shrub lands called chaperol, which consist of these tough, woody, drought-resistant bushes. Chaperol is literally the most flammable vegetation

in the United States. Some chaperol seeds only germinate in extreme heat and as a result the plants contain resins and oils that actually encourage blazes. Isn't that incredible? It means that these plants literally evolved to catch on fire. That's how they f***ing reproduce. And when they burn, they burn big. According to the California Chaparral Institute, infrequent, large, high-intensity wildfires is the natural condition of Chaparral, and this stuff wants to burn in exactly the locations where it just did. So scientists did a study analyzing Southern California's fire history, which areas burned,

and how often. And it turns out that the Santa Monica Mountains, which contains the Pacific Palisades and Malibu, burned more often than anywhere else. Sometimes as often as once a decade. These places burned down. So when European settlers came west to California, we started this endless and fruitless campaign to suppress that fire, to make sure that fires never happened, stupidly ignoring the fact that fire is just part of nature the same way rain is. Earth, wind, water, heart, fire. It's Captain Planet s***. So in a sense, this fire is exactly what we should have expected to happen all along. But, you know, it's not

all Mother Nature, because this fire would not have been so bad were it not for the climate change that we humans caused. See, a common misconception is that climate change is just making the earth warmer, and it does that on average, but just as importantly, it also makes the weather much more variable, with rapid see-saws from one extreme to another. And that is exactly what happened in LA. The previous two years in Southern California, 2022 and 2023, were the wettest in recent memory. So wet that they ended SoCal's historic drought

and left nearly all of California's reservoirs at or above their historical averages. But you know what else loved that wet weather? The Chaperol. These bushes slurped up the atmospheric rivers and grew like f***ing crazy. But then, in 2024, the atmospheric rivers ran dry and the wet weather stopped.

From May of 2024 through New Year's 2025, not a single drop of rain fell on LA. In 150 years of record keeping, this has been the second driest winter LA has ever experienced. It would have been first, but someone spilled a couple of drops of their Erawan smoothie in Griffith Park. So because of that record dryness, the Chaperol dried up and turned into the perfect kindling for a historic fire.

But while human-caused climate change supplied the fuel, it didn't build thousands of homes right next to the tinderbox. We did that. Los Angeles, like all of California, loves to build homes right up to the edge of nature. This area is called the wildland urban interface, and it's a particularly dangerous place to live because it, you know, tends to catch on fire a lot. So why would we build there? Well, first of all, because it's gorgeous. I mean, just look at this shit. Beautiful. But a lot of people live there

because they literally have nowhere else to go. See, when Los Angeles was sold to Americans back in the 40s and 50s, it was sold as a single-family paradise, where every man could have a ranch home with an orange tree, two kids, and a wife who would quietly resent you because you made her quit the talkies to raise them.

As a result, Los Angeles today is dominated by single-family zoning. On almost three-quarters of residential land in LA, it is literally illegal to build an apartment building even if you wanted to. Now, this has a lot of bad effects. It makes housing more expensive because there's less of it, and it also enforces race and class segregation. Segregation was in fact part of the point of this zoning because if poor people can't afford to live near you,

then you don't have to live next to any poor people, do ya? But set all those problems aside for a second. Right now, we're talking about fire, and you better believe that single-family zoning makes that f***ing worse too, because it forces the population to expand outwards, taking up more land rather than upwards into denser housing. In other words, single-family zoning

is the man-spreading of urban design. It's an inefficient use of space and it ruins your commute. So let's take a look at Altadena, one of the two neighborhoods that burned down in these fires. It's a middle-class town with a significant population of black homeowners. Why? Because nearby Pasadena was so redlined,

so low density, and so expensive that Altadena was the most affordable neighborhood they had access to, and they built a beautiful community there. But unfortunately, Altadena is so far outside the city center, it backs up against the Angeles National Forest, which once again is a landscape designed to burn.

And two weeks ago, that's exactly what happened. The entire neighborhood was leveled and tens of thousands of people lost their homes. People who were essentially pushed to live in that spot because of how the city was zoned. And it won't be the last time this happens because there are 4.5 million California homes built on the edge of nature

in the wildland urban interface, the most of any state. So let's recap for a second. We took an area that was built by nature to burn, made it worse through climate change, which we caused, and then instituted a system of zoning that basically forces people to live at the door of the furnace. That means that the politicians who planned development

in this state have been practically begging for fire to fuck us up. It is insane. They're like lifeguards telling us to swim towards the sharks and they've known that they were doing it for decades. Nearly 30 years ago, the great writer Mike Davis wrote an article that pissed everyone off. It was called, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.

And in it, he argued that it was stupid to keep building in areas that are guaranteed to burn down, and even stupider to have every taxpayer bail them out so they could rebuild larger than before and just as likely to go up in flames. Davis talks about how starting in the 1950s, the policy response to fires in Malibu was to actually subsidize rebuilding with loans and tax relief, even though the area was guaranteed to burn down again, which is exactly what happened most recently this f***ing year. So what is Governor Gavin Newsom's bold and innovative response to these latest fires? Oh, he's just going to make it easier to rebuild there at taxpayer expense, yet f***ing again.

You know what the hard truth is? We might need to accept that some spots maybe just shouldn't have f***ing homes in them. Take this strip of houses in Malibu, right between the rising ocean and the constantly on fire wilderness. Maybe we shouldn't rebuild them. Malibu, right between the rising ocean and the constantly on fire wilderness. Maybe we shouldn't rebuild them. Maybe we should buy those people out and just let it be a f***ing beach. We can surf and swim and then when it burns down, we can skedaddle back to our houses in the part of the city that isn't on f***ing fire all the time. Now look, people have a right to build wherever they want.

They need places to live and I'm'm not gonna criticize any individual homeowner who lost their home from wanting to rebuild the home they loved. But how about this? I think instead of making it impossible to build more affordable housing in safer places, and incentivizing people to rebuild in fire-prone areas, maybe the government could do the fucking opposite for once and make it easier

to build in places that don't burn down once a decade. The state's response to these neighborhoods going up like kindling cannot only be to replace the kindling just as it was, just where it was, as quickly as possible, and at a taxpayer-funded discount. That is not bravery. That is not resilience. That is denial. Climate change is only going to make these fires more frequent. And we have a glaringly obvious solution to make California safer in the face of them. We could rezone the city to allow more housing in areas that don't border the fire zone. But that is a solution that our cowardly politicians refuse to try for fear of pissing off the

homeowners who don't like apartment buildings. Like okay, even before this fire, LA was in a housing crisis. But local politicians have seemingly done everything possible to avoid building more affordable housing, especially in, again, the three quarters of Los Angeles that is restricted to single-family homes. Take Mayor Karen Bass. Her first week in office, she signed Executive Directive 1, or ED1. This was a terrific measure.

It was designed to speed the construction of 100% affordable housing developments, something the city desperately needs. But two years later, she gutted her own directive, amending it so that it couldn't work in single-family, home-zoned areas. Why? Not because it wasn't successful at building affordable housing, no.

Instead, she gutted it because it was so successful at what it was designed to do that wealthy homeowners complained. Even though the majority of Karen's constituents are renters, she bent the knee to the wealthy homeowners because of their outsized political power in the city. And you know what? The LA City Council did the same f***ing thing.

They had a vote this December on a proposal by Councilwoman Nithya Raman that would have allowed some mid-sized apartment buildings in single-family zone neighborhoods. Once again, something we desperately need. But this was voted down 10 to five in favor of plans to restrict new apartment buildings to the areas that

are already dense, effectively keeping three quarters of the city off limits to new affordable housing, even though, again, we are in a f***ing housing crisis. And the LA Zoning Commission unanimously voted on a development plan last year that would also leave single-family zones untouched. LA is already the second most expensive place in the US to live. And because of these fires, tens of thousands of people just lost their homes and will need to find new housing, putting even more pressure on the market. As a result, we've already seen massive rent gouging and a rise in homelessness is almost

assured. It is f***ing grim. So the only solution is for us to use this moment to fundamentally rethink the urban shape of LA. Like the worst happened. The disaster struck. The city was destroyed. But now we get to decide what kind of city we want to rebuild. Do we want to fight an endlessly losing battle against an unquenchable, ever-strengthening foe or do we want to build a couple new apartment buildings in Santa Monica and Silver Lake?

Do we want to keep subsidizing construction in the exact same areas just so they get burned down again or do we want to subsidize the safe, affordable housing that we need? And do we want to be a vibrant and diverse global city driven by a giant, thriving middle class? Or do we want to shrivel up into a decaying, gated retirement community for the wealthy surrounded by a sea of flames? So to our politicians who run our city, I know that you did not create Los Angeles's tinderbox ecology, our addiction to single-family homes, or the slow rise of climate change. But you did inherit all of those problems

and all of those decisions. And now the bill for them has come due. The Piper must be paid. I love Los Angeles. I know that you do too. And if you wanna save it, you need to do something other than throw blame around and try to win the next election

by maintaining the status quo and keeping the same few rich people happy. You need to actually save this city by finding the political courage to fucking act. That was a Head Gum podcast. Hi guys, I'm Ago Wodim. Check out my new show, Thanks Dad, now on HeadGum. I was raised by a single mom and I don't have a relationship with my dad and, spoiler, I don't think I'm

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