Plain English with Derek Thompson - The L.A. Fires: How They Happened, Climate Change’s Role, and What the City Must Do Now

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

With so many confusing narratives unfolding around a fire that is still raging out of control, I wanted to talk to somebody I knew and trusted to get stories like this right. Robinson Meyer is the founder and editor of Heatmap News and a former staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covered climate news and related disasters. We talk about why this Los Angeles fire is so unusual, how it differs from most recent forest fires in California, the role of climate change, and what Los Angeles and other places can do to protect people from the inevitability of future disasters. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Robinson Meyer Producer: Devon Baroldi Links: Could More Controlled Burns Have Helped?  5 Startups Working on LA Fires  What Started The Fires?  Why LA’s Fires Are Exceptionally Hard to Fight  Does climate change make the Santa Ana winds worse? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up everybody? Chris Vernon here and welcome to a new season of the NBA and the mismatch. And huge welcome as well to my new co-host, Dave Jacoby. I can't wait to link with you twice a week every Tuesday and Friday right here on the mismatch to break down everything that's happening in the league. Who's playing well, who we loved, who we loathed, trade rumors, team dysfunction. We've got you covered right here. So follow us, subscribe and hit us with those five-star ratings on Spotify or wherever you get you. your podcast. And also don't forget to follow us on social media. That's at Ringer NBA. And check out the full mismatch episodes with the two handsomest podcasters in the history of podcasting

right on the Ringer NBA YouTube channel. Over the past week, like many of you, I've been gutted and astonished by the devastation in Los Angeles. As we record this, more than 20 people have died in the Los Angeles fires. More than 10,000 homes are destroyed and 200,000. residents have been displaced. And those statistics, of course, only brush the surface of the devastation this means to people who have lost their homes, their memories, their wealth, their community. Members of my family, some of the people I love most in this world have been deeply, deeply affected by the fires.

I know many employees of the ringer have either lost homes or known someone who lost a home, whether in the palisades, where the destruction was most widespread, and in the Eaton fire near Altadena. and Pasadena. And so I felt compelled to do a show on how to protect California now and in the future. Protecting California begins with seeing this crisis clearly. And already the story has become contaminated by a mixture of rumor and misunderstanding that's obscuring the actual crisis before us.

For example, the day after the fire started, several prominent sources claimed that the city of Los Angeles had recently cut its fire department budget. This was plainly false. On X, Elon Musk wrote that, quote, the biggest factor is that crazy environmental regulations prevent building firebreaks and clearing brush near houses. End quote. Fire breaks in this context means an obstacle in the fire's path,

namely, or typically a gap in the vegetation that the fire can't cross. This was another common narrative, and there is some truth to it. Environmental regulations really do restrict the amount of forest clearing that happens across California. But it's important to state that this was not an ordinary fire. It was spread by ferocious Santa Ana winds where fast-moving air is pulled from the Great Basin near Western California and beyond toward the warmer Pacific coast. In this case, winds were consistently blowing 20, 30 miles an hour with gusts up to 100 miles an hour,

spewing embers like confetti in a hurricane. Would firebreaks really have made the difference in this crisis? Chief Brian Fennessey of the Orange County Fire Authority said, quote, you could have put a 10-lane highway in front of that fire, and it would not have slowed it one bit. End quote. Some claims will just take time to fully evaluate. Perhaps the most common criticism I've seen

is the idea that Los Angeles refused to fill its reservoirs. Several viral videos clearly show a large reservoir in Pacific Palisades that was bone-dry and out-of-commission had been for months heading into the dangerous Santa Ana-W-Win season. Was this L.A.'s critical mistake? Maybe. We'll learn more in the months to come. But Eric Scott, the fire department's public information officer, has said the Department of Water and Power filled all available storage tanks

in the Palisades area. Water availability was limited, he said, not because of anything having to do with reservoirs, but rather because extreme demand for water overtook the system and limited water pressure in elevated Palisades neighborhoods. We're still early, early, early, early in this crisis, and a lot more is going to become clear

in the next few weeks, especially as we have independent investigations. But with so many confusing narratives and folding around a fire that's still raging out of control in many places. I wanted to talk to somebody I knew and trusted to get stories like this right. Robinson Meyer is the founder and editor of HeatMap News and a former staff writer at The Atlantic where he covered climate and related disasters. We talk about why this fire was so unusual,

how it differs from the last few years of forest fire news throughout California, the role the climate change is playing. and what Los Angeles and other places can do to protect people from the inevitability of future disasters. Future natural disasters in California are inevitable. Part of what makes California so beautiful, so unbelievably gorgeous, is its wildness. And the risk of fire is a part of that wildness. coexisting with this wild state of nature is going to require incredible ingenuity from California's political leaders. Now, I don't think the state of California has covered itself with glory from a

governance standpoint in the last few years, quite the opposite. But the long history of the American city is in fact a history of building back smarter following crisis after crisis after crisis. Famously, after the Chicago fire of 1871, that city's fire-flattened business district was rebuilt with brick and stone and iron. The very word skyscraper was invented to describe the steel skeleton buildings that came up in Chicago after that fires crisis. Less famously, in 1888, a historic snowstorm demolished the above-ground transit of New York and Boston, inspiring those city's leaders to put their trains underground.

America's first subways were open just a few years later. The history of the American city from the subway to the skyscraper is a history of leaders responding to crises in part by seeing them clearly. The fact that it takes a tragedy

to do what is needed is itself a kind of tragedy. But there is a vein of U.S. history that says America is often at its best when things are at their worst. I think we can all pray that this will be L.A.'s legacy, too, when the fire is out and the plans begin. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Robinson Meyer, welcome back to the podcast. Derek, thank you so much for having me. I want to reserve a good chunk of time to talk about how to make Los Angeles and, by extension,

California more resilient to fire risk. But first, I think it's worthwhile to talk about what's happening on the ground right now. Fire is not unusual in California, but this fire is unusual, certainly in the sheer amount of urban devastation it's unleashing in Los Angeles. What do you think makes this fire different? So I think when we think about this fire, we have to almost separate it from the set of fires that have happened in California over the past decade. Because over the past decade, as Californians know, as anyone around the country knows, there have been a series of extremely destructive record-breaking fires around California.

Most of them have happened in the states north or in central region. Most of them have been forest fires. This fire is different because it's happening in the south. It's happening not in the forest in Chaparral or in Brushland. And it's happening around cities. and all of that around Los Angeles, right? And so all of that makes it really different from even the type of extreme firestorm-style fire that we've been hearing about from California for the past decade or so.

And so when you look at the fact that this isn't happening in a forest and that it seems incredibly related to the wind, just tell me again, what do you think are the set of circumstances in Southern California that seemed to have created this hellish context for a fire of this level of destruction.

So when you want to think about a forest fire or a wildfire of any type, there's three things you look for. The first is fuel, some kind of substance to burn. The second is oxygen. It needs oxygen to consume, right? That's what fires devour. And the third thing is heat

or a source of ignition. Most fires over the past decade in California, you know, when you think about forest fires in California has been an extremely destructive past few years. Most of California's largest and most destructive fire, including its largest and most destructive fire on record have happened in the past 10 years. Most of them happened in North or Central California, and most of them were forest fires. So they were moving through huge chunks of mostly uninhabited forest, although tragically there were villages, there were towns within that wildland. But moving mostly through uninhabited or scarcely inhabited forest that had been not been burned for a long time, where there had been a

regime for the past century of putting out and fighting wildfires when you can. And that meant a huge amount of fuel had built up in the ecosystem. And that fuel, when there was a dry period or when there was a hot period or when there was just a source of ignition was ready to combust in a huge firestorm. That's been the driver of the big California fires over the past decade. This fire, the Los Angeles fires are a little different. And I think when people think about this fire, they're like putting in ideas from thinking about the campfire or any of the other big California fires from the past decade. And they need to be, or the Napa fires, right? And they need to be thinking about this one a little different because it's in Southern California.

What makes this fire different is, number one, just the fact that it's happening in and around Los Angeles, which means that instead of being a forest fire in a mostly remote area where you can do things like clear big fire breaks, where there's a lot of room for firefighters to move around, a lot of freedom in their movement, this is happening in a city. And so the main source of fuel for this fire, when it hasn't been homes, has not been forest, has not been. you know, the northern California woods, it has been chaparral, it's been brushland. It's been this kind of low, shrubby brush that is all across the, you know, the Southern California coast. What also makes this fire different and links it a little bit to the other set of California fires that we've seen is that, you know, it's been a, California's gone in and out of drought over the past decade. And when an area is in drought, when California's in drought, a few things can happen. First of all, it just gets very hot over the summer and that dries out the vegetation. But what has

contributed to this fire is that it was actually a wetter winter. And so a lot of vegetation had a chance to grow last winter. And then it hasn't rained at all basically since May. There's been less than a tenth of an inch of rain since May. And so all that vegetation has gotten completely dried out. It's been hot. Basically, it was primed to burn. And then the Santa to Anna winds, these hot, dry, almost like an atmospheric blow dryer came over the mountains, went through the fuel, and as soon as there was a source of ignition, it was just poised for a big fire. What seems really important there is that a lot of people, as you said, are mapping fires in forests onto the fires happening in California. But this is a totally different type of land.

It's brushland or chaparral rather than forests. And so the formula here for a historic fire is more about L.A. having basically no rain for the last few months after a wet period. So you have shrubs that grew and then totally dried out. That's the fuel, in addition to the homes. And then you have the Santa Ana winds with this atmospheric blow dryer that are blowing at historic velocities across Los Angeles and then just whipping the embers around. In the last few years, the data is very clear that the frequency of large firestorms in California has gone up and up and up. I don't want to spend all of our time on climate change,

but I do want to spend a little bit of time here on whether you think climate change is making California's fires worse and how exactly climate change is making California fires worse. So again, I think it's really important to think about what's happening in the state versus these fires,

because we'd think about climate change differently in both places. So let's talk about, one than the other. In California, we are relatively sure that climate change is making California's fires worse. And that is because climate change is making it hotter. It's making it especially hotter over the summer. That's driving more evaporation. I mean, this is just basic physics, right? It's driving more evaporation. It's getting water through plants faster. It's drying out those plants and ecosystems and making them more prime to burn. And we do know that there's been great

research by a guy named Park Williams out of UCLA that fires have been larger than we would expect in a non-climate change world over the past decade in California. And it has driven these huge, huge firestorms. Now, it's not the only driver. We also know that we're coming out of like a century of fighting every wildfire we can and that built up a lot of fuel in the ecosystem. Climate change has absolutely made just wildfires across California. California and across the mountain Westworths. In these fires, the story is related but different. So heat played a big role.

The lack of rain in Los Angeles since May has played a big role. But it's really the Santa Ana Wins plus the dryness that have played a big role. And here, I think it's important to think about not so much just like is the landscape prime to burn, but is the landscape prime to burn right now? So climate change, actually, there is some evidence that it's. going to weaken the Santa Ana winds, these huge, big, fast-moving hot winds that move over the Los Angeles basin.

So you'd think, oh, well, that means that these kinds of fires are becoming less, you know, will become less common over time. Maybe there isn't a climate signal here. I think what's interesting is that when you look, big wildfires in this part of the state are caused by this window, this, this, this, this coincidence between two phenomena.

And that is, you tend to get Santa Ana wins, and they happen from October to January, and then you get the rains arriving in Southern California and in Los Angeles around November and December. And so historically, there's been this period in October, in November, even pushing into early December, where you had both winds, you know, these hot, dry winds, and the rains hadn't come yet. And so the fuel was maximally poised to burn. our concern going forward is that climate change is going to keep pushing the arrival of the rains later and there's going to be more and more autumn dryness and that autumn dryness is both going to become from delay of the rains and because it's going to be hot over the summer which is just going to lead to more dryness in the fall right

as it gets drier in the autumn and as the rains delay their arrival even if the Santa Ant winds or weakening, the window where you can get a hugely destructive Southern California fire is growing, right? And so instead of how it used to be, which is you get Santa Ana winds in October and it's dry, you get them in November and it's dry, but then the rains arrive and you get rid of all that fuel, it gets wet, the ecosystem gets wet. And so even if you have winds in December or January, you know, there's not the same fire risk. Now as the rains delay their arrival and as the fuel gets hotter and dry over the summer and pushing into the fall, and it just stays on the ground and the rains don't arrive, the potential for a big firestorm gets bigger.

That's really interesting. So the Santa Ana winds, by definition, can't create any fires, but they can amplify a spark. And so climate change might shift this intensely dry season toward the window of the Santa Ana winds, creating an elevated risk at the way. winds are going to be sweeping across Los Angeles at exactly the moment when you have all of this dried out fuel waiting for a spark. That's how you'd frame the climate risk to this part of the state? I'd almost say the Santa Ana window is always October to January. And it used to be the big wildfire window was like October to November. But as climate change has pushed that back, has made fuel drier and has delayed potentially the arrival of the rains, suddenly more

and more of the Santa Ana window has the potential to have big fires. That's really interesting. So we're talking about this disaster as a purely natural disaster right now, or maybe anthropogenic natural disaster. But there's a view in some corners that there is no such thing as a purely natural disaster. If there's a destructive fire or if there's a destructive flood, we can typically pinpoint the human error that was largely responsible for that catastrophe. And I think it's a fair instinct to a certain extent.

Like we should want to know why bad things happen in our cities or in our towns. We can solve those problems in the future. But that has opened up the door to a lot of accusations about L.A. and California policy, some of which I think seem quite valid and some of which I think sound rather invalid. But there are people pointing to the fact that, you know, fire management in this part of the city has been extremely lackluster, that they should have been clearing Shrubland much more aggressively than they were. I've seen reports, many reports, about this infamous empty reservoir near the Palisades, whose emptiness meant there wasn't enough water for the urban firefighters to fight these flames.

Based on your reporting, the people you've talked to, the people who you've read, are you persuaded that this fire was made significantly worse by human policy areas? I think I want to divide this into two questions. I think on the policy error side, let's talk about policies and then let's talk about people, right? So on the policy error side, when you have a fire this big, and especially when you have a fire this big in an urban area, in a topography as complicated, especially as the palisades, and with extremely hot, hot, fast winds blowing over the ground. My colleague Jiva Lang has been great reporting on this. It is almost impossible to fight that fire. And so once the fire gets going, it's very hard to imagine. And I think experts have told my colleagues here, there is basically no brush clearing you can do.

There's very little amount of water system management you can do that will prepare you to fight a fire of this scale. And that's because if you think about fighting a fire in the forest, like a Northern California wildfire, you can do a lot without using water, right? Firefighters actually do a lot of firefighting without using water. They can use retardants. They can get a fire from the air. They can build fire breaks, right?

They can cut down trees and bulldozed down areas. They can make trenches. They can do a lot to contain a fire so that it can expand. If you're in a city, suddenly none of those tools apply. And also you're working with a water system that is designed to serve, to fight, you know, to serve residential customers and also to fight house fires, maybe a two or three structure fire, not a whole neighborhood on fire. And also, also, there's winds. And so your big tool in fighting an urban fire is getting at it from the air. But above 30 miles per hour, you can't fly, right?

you can't get anything up in the air in the winds of that size. And so you're just kind of made powerless. So on the human policy error side, I expect there to be investigations. But I also think right now the scale of the hazard, the intensity of the winds, the speed of the winds, I don't think we have seen a clear policy error here that could have averted a fire of this size. Where I want to talk about like human error is that you still need an, an ignition for these fires. These fires didn't start themselves.

And I expect that we'll learn over the next few weeks and months where these fires began. The source of natural ignition in the California fire system is like lightning strikes, but there hasn't been a rainstorm, so there wasn't a lightning strike here. So we know the ignition was almost certainly unnatural. It was from a human source. It could be something innocuous, right? Someone's cigarette got caught in the wind or something. Whether a spark came off someone's engine, it could be from utility infrastructure.

It could be arson. It could be a firework. I think we just don't know exactly why these fires started. Now, because of the way the winds work, it only takes one ignition, potentially in the whole valley because the winds are capable of carrying embers or sparks between different parts. of the city. So it only takes one ignition, but we still don't know where exactly that ignition or multiple ignitions came from. And I think there could be policy errors there. I really appreciated your answer on the policy side. I think it's very easy to sit at home

and identify something that you see on the internet and say, oh, that thing that someone did several months ago, that's responsible for the fires now engulfing Los Angeles. But to your point, we just don't know. And I want to circle this bit with a lot of a lot of uncertainty that I want to pay closer attention to this. We should all pay closer attention to it because if there was a policy mistake, if there was a human mistake, seeing it, understanding it, knowing how to make it less likely in the future could save dozens, hundreds of lives, billions of dollars. But I think all of the factors that you pointed to are really, really critical. Could I point out another thought to kind of around this as well?

Because I think it's worth making another point here, which is like, look, we talk about the water system, right? And there's reporting about this reservoir up in the palisades being offline. There's been great reporting from the LA Times from my colleague Jiva Lang at HeatMap about how it's just hard if you're fighting fires at sea level to get water up into the palisades, up on topography, up on mountains, to also get enough water pressure to get the water up there in the palisades. And so there's been a lot of accusations that are like, well, why isn't there more investment in the water system? You're also now beginning to see, as people investigate, like, where did the ignition for this fire come from? Investigation to, like, well, did it come from the local utility? Should the local utility have buried more of its lines?

And my colleague Matthew Zitland, any great point about this, which is, like, when you're talking about building a water system ready to fight this scale of urban fire, when you talk about building a power distribution, system in Los Angeles, where a huge amount of the transmission lines, because this is what it could take, are buried underground. You're talking about enormous costs and enormous costs levied up front. And so just think about what the policy environment looks like when there's not a fire, right? And that is the utility comes to the local regulator, and they say, we have to invest tens of billions of dollars. in our distribution system burying all our lines underground. Or the local water system comes to the government and they say, we actually need to make huge, huge investments

in this water system so that it's willing, so that it's able to fight a fire that no other water system in the world is capable of fighting. All of that gets paid for by California taxpayers. And if you think about the rest of the policy environment in Los Angeles, like it's very focused on the cost of living, right? It's very focused on high government expenditure. And so it might be that we need those governments, you know, those large government expenditures

to be able to have a city where Los Angeles is. But I just want to point out here that like when we talk about, oh, this, this aspect of the fire could have been averted with massive front end investment. There's like a reason why that front end investment didn't happen. And it's because, like, we're never, right? There's tons of investment we could make it any time. And it's always controversial. And so I just want to, like, we might identify what kind of notionally looks like a policy error and which could be a policy error.

And it's going to take massive investment in adaptation and hardening in our infrastructure to be able to get ready for climate change. But so often when we talk about those investments or when we talk about what the scale of that project might look like, it's written off as like hugely wasteful spending or just like spending that there isn't room for in the budget at that moment. And so a bunch of, I guess what I'm saying here is like a bunch of well-meaning people can arrive at these policy errors and not realize their policy errors at the time. I think it's a fair point. I do want to make a subtle cut here to say that there are some errors that might be a failure of spending and there are some errors that might be a failure of state capacity.

And those are all different categories. And I'm not suggesting that you're saying they aren't different categories. But for example, spending an unprecedented amount of money in order to bury all of the power lines in Southern California is one policy that, yes, will cost billions of dollars. But in a world where an independent investigation ends up concluding that the emptying of the local reservoir near the palisades and the fact that it couldn't be worked on for months and months due to bureaucratic delays actually had an end result that is calculated in the billions of dollars and dozens of homes. That actually isn't about spending at all. That's about California

politics not working. So I want to back up from both of those points to say they're both possible and I don't have enough information to be able to say here are the errors. the California made because the taxpayers wouldn't spend enough money, and here are the errors that California made because all of its political processes are wrapped up in bureaucratic tape, but it's possible that when the final analysis is made, will identify failures in both buckets. Is that fair to say? It totally is. And there's another, you know, I would put in the related category that one thing we do know that happened in Southern California in Los Angeles is that the utility

brought a bunch of buried power lines to the local regulator, and the regulator said, actually, don't bury as many. Like, here's a smaller number. With that being the status quo, I think there's also questions around should the utility have cut off power to more of the power grid in order to avert an ignition event

like might have happened in these fires. And we've seen that in the past in California, right? There have been blackouts. There have been periods where the utility across California simply announced that they're not going to be able to bring power to certain areas because it's windy, because there's wildfire risk, and they just say it's not worth it. We have to cut power to this region to avoid sending electricity over a certain line or through

a certain area during this period of high wildfire risk. Now, of course, it would be outrageously expensive to cut power to parts of Los Angeles. But it's even more expensive to have to rebuild those parts of Los Angeles after a wildfire destroys them all. And so we just don't. that's that's like a maybe a third bucket there too. Yeah if the final investigation concludes that this was caused by a PG&E spark, I have no doubt that bearing the lines is going to become an enormous, maybe the dominant debate in California politics in the near future. But there's also the possibility that this was like two kids in a lighter and they lit a brush on fire and it was a total mistake and it caused $150 billion in damage because the Santa Ana wins just took the

flames everywhere. So I want to move to the second part of the conversation. here about solutions and how to fight fire better in Southern California. When I was researching what to do now, you know, what good ideas are out there to mitigate fire risk and save homes, it seemed to me to break down into three categories. And I want you to help me walk through those three categories smartly. First, you can fight fire by managing the wildness around these homes. Second, you can fight fire risk by hardening the homes and the neighborhoods themselves where people live. And third, you can fight fire risk. You can fight fire risk by hardening the homes and the neighborhoods themselves where people live. And third, you can beef up firefighting technology, fire detecting technology,

make it easier to stop fires when they start. So I'm thinking of those as like the three theaters of war, so to speak, the wildness, the home, and the technology. So let's go through them one, two, three. And let's focus the conversation on Southern California with the understanding, you've made this point several times. It's an important point that the best way to fight fires around the Bay Area are not necessarily the best way to fight fires in the palisades. So starting with the wildness and understanding that in Southern California, we're talking about brushland, scrubland, which is trickier maybe than, you know, thinning millions of acres of forest in the north.

Rob, realistically speaking, what can Los Angeles do better on this front? Can it do better on this front? my colleague Katie Brigham has done great reporting on this exact question. And I think people can look at two different practices that could be used here. One is controlled fire or managed fire, right? You set a fire in a certain area during a period of the year when the risk of that fire getting out of control is more contained. And when you have more resources to kind of fight and manage that fire, so you eliminate fuel and prevent a kind of future out of control. troll fire from happening there. The second is brush clearing, which is more targeted toward the

type of landscape, the type of shrub land that exists in Los Angeles and the Pacific Palisades in Southern California. When Katie talked to different experts here, there was some disagreement. And some folks said, yes, you actually can manage the vegetation to a degree that you don't have the same wildfire risk. But other experts said, look, there was a fire here. There was a fire here. 50 years ago. And this type of landscape is supposed to burn, you know, every 20 to 100 years. And so the interval here between fires was not like totally out of control. This was not a landscape that was just begging to be burned. And so there's less that we might be able to do in this kind of shrubland interface. Yes, we can do brush clearing. We could probably do a better job of it.

but there's less that we're able to do here around mitigating, let's say the natural hazards, the fuel hazards of wildfire, and we should instead be looking at building neighborhoods and building homes so that they don't burn. Your colleague, I believe this was Katie Brigham, made a really interesting point with some of the experts that she spoke to. So this is an article called, and we'll link to it in the show notes, could more controlled burns have stopped the LA fires?

And it should be said, this is one of the most common solutions you're going to see if you read commentary and newspapers, magazines on the internet. Everyone is talking about how to control the wildness around urban areas. But she spoke to some experts who suggested that burning shrubland and brushland, like that which surrounds Los Angeles, can sometimes introduce the possibility that species of grass, not native to the area, end up growing in the interval, and that vegetation is actually more likely to burn than the original shrubland and grassland.

I don't want to make this problem seem impossible because I don't believe that problems like this are impossible, but it should be noted that there might even be a risk to pursuing the Northern California policy of just thin and control burns in Southern California. Am I reading your colleagues' work wrongly, or do you agree that this is a tricky problem to solve? with tradeoffs on the other side?

I think it's a really tricky problem to solve. We'll talk about homes in a second, but one thing that these conversations always make me think of is that when you look around the world, right, there are certain building practices that have grown up in certain places around the world, and particularly, let's say, in Eurasia, where the buildings are built to withstand

certain aspects of the local environment. And sometimes that is the neighborhoods are built with in the Middle East, right, there are very narrow sidewalks between, in the old town, in the old parts of the Middle East, there's very narrow sidewalks between buildings, and that means that they're in shadow more of the day. In parts of the world where humans, the same community of humans have been living for a long time, we have gotten good at understanding the hazards of the national environment and then building cities

and building neighborhoods in places where people want to live, but also in ways that kind of mitigate the hazards. In the U.S., we, like, are very eager to, first of all, build the same type of house everywhere around the country, more or less, but also to import practices from one region of the country to another, and that doesn't always work. And that's what I think of when I, you know, hear Katie's reporting on this topic. So, again, I said that I want to think about this in three parts. The Wild, the home, and the technology.

Let's move on to part two, the home. There's this concept of home hardening, and I want to know what you think it would look like in Los Angeles. So Patrick T. Brown, who is the co-director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct member in the Energy Policy and Climate Program at Johns Hopkins, he wrote an essay that was published in City Journal, where he talks about, quote, installing non-combustible roofing materials, metal, tile, or asphalt shank.

Engels, ember-resistant vents with mesh screens, fire-resistant materials for siding like stucco, fiber-cement, or metal, have all been shown to be effective in both lab and real-world settings, end quote. Rob, when you think about home-hardening, the kind of houses that have just been burned in Los Angeles, what do you think about? So I think there's two different categories to think about here. The first is exactly the set of material constraints that you were just talking about, right? There are certain materials that you can build a home out of.

And specifically, as you were saying, attention you can pay to the roof to how air and material, you know, to how air and embers might move from outside the home to inside the home. There's a particular attention you can pay to just what is the home made of, and are those materials particularly likely to burn in a very dry, hot, you know, catastrophically hot environment. There's also a set of practices that go from what you build a home out of to how you manage the landscape around a home. And so one thing we've learned over time is that if there's vegetation around a home,

if there's trees or shrubs that are really up against the structure itself, those can provide a nexus for a fire to leap from a structure that's burning. next to a home or from shrub land that's burning next to a home to that vegetation, which is primed to burn, then to the structure itself. There's two examples. Here's two things I want to point people here to. The first is that the Getty Villa Museum, not the Getty Museum, but the Getty Villa Museum is in the Palisades and was in the area burned by the fire.

And they have reported so far that their structure is intact. And why they've said that they survived is because, number one, they were doing pretty aggressive pruning of the vegetation so that there wasn't vegetation incurring itself. There was some distance between vegetation and the structure. And second, they built and hardened the structure against wildfire. There's another factor here, too, that I'm going to, it's a really cool video. My colleague Jiva Lang has been done some reporting on it, which is not only how you build a home, but potentially if you're really attuned to fire, what you put in a home. So natural materials actually burn much more slowly than synthetic materials.

And there's this great video online comparing housefire in a home furnished with natural materials like wool versus a housefire in a home furnished with synthetic materials. And you can see the synthetic materials go up in three or four minutes while the natural material is actually smolder very slowly. There's a similar effect there to how people can both furnish their homes and also having those same kind of, fire resistant materials in the structure itself. The third category is technology, and this is absurd and wishcasting, and I acknowledge that, but when I see these fires, one of the first things I think about, especially when I see a helicopter flying over and making some drop, is why can't we get a zillion drones with water or fire retardant solution up there, flying around, dousing the flames from above?

I'm sure that's ridiculous in some way. I've considered this thought for about half a second, but it does open up this category of fire-fighting technology, and you're so much closer to the ground when it comes to understanding climate technology. Where are we in this category of fire technology? Is there anything around the corner that could be useful here? I'm going to point you again to my colleague, Katie Brigham's reporting.

She did a great story about five tech startups working to come. combat fires. I think you'll see that they're in a mix of areas trying to anticipate. They're in a mix. These startups are working on a mix of topics, ranging from trying to fight fires before they start, either because they're aware of how the grid might start a fire, or they're using remote sensing data or artificial intelligence to look at places where a wildfire is especially likely to break out so that you could pre-position resources there to fight it.

There's also a company called BurnBot that is looking at whether you could deploy robots that could chop up vegetation or even conduct controlled burns in a place where people aren't nearby or in a setting where people can't access as easily. I'll say about climate technology writ large. First of all, Army of firefighting drones, love it. The issue with these fires is that the winds were blowing so fast, right? above 30, 40 miles per hour, you can't fly any aircraft, much less a small one. That was really one of the big challenges to fighting these fires as they grew. And we know that these, you know,

Santa Ana winds had sustained winds of 50 or 60 miles per hour with gusts of 100 miles per hour. You can't be flying a drone, especially one with a lithium battery around in that type of, in that type of atmospheric environment. What unites a lot of, you know, what unites a lot of, startups in let's say the fire prevention space. And really, someone once told me the thing that unites all climate startups is that they have bad customers. The customer is a utility that has very answerable to certain kinds of regulators and has a very kind of fixed cost schedule.

Or it's a local government that's trying to figure out where they could spend money and how to spend money in the most cost. efficient way and the most realistic ways. I think there's absolutely stuff that technology can do here, and I'm going to point people to Katie's story because she finds a set of companies working on this set of problems. And yet, if you have a city built where Los Angeles is surrounded by brushland with fast-moving hot winds moving across the surface and many, many sources of ignition, and it's as dry as it is, there are limits to what technology can do to fight.

So to summarize my one, two, three, it sounds like you're saying on the shrub clearing side, there's a possibility that we can do better, but that possible benefit comes with certain tradeoffs. On the home hardening side, that's where we really seem to be most likely to get the biggest bang for buck. And the number three on technology, maybe something comes down the pike, but climate tech is really hard to integrate because, look, if you're the city of Los Angeles and you're trying to keep cost low in a high-cost city, it's difficult to say we spent $30 million updating the software year after year on this drone fighting program that might not even work because we bought it nine years ago and there hasn't been a Palisade-style fire in the area in the

last decade. That can be a hard thing to justify, and so it makes the city a bad clientele for certain climate tech. I want to close by talking about... the future of Los Angeles, especially as it comes to home building and insurance, starting with the need to build. So Los Angeles started the week with a housing shortage in the hundreds of thousands, and now it's ending the week with thousands of homes destroyed and tens of thousands of newly homeless families. It seems to me like the state is prepared to relax CEQA, its environmental regulation, to accelerate home building in the burned areas. But tens of thousands of people need housing immediately, and those areas might not be livable for a while. And so,

personally, I would like to see SICO relaxed for non-burned areas as well. The need for apartments is going to be absolutely dire. I mean, I read this over the weekend. A Pacific Palisades real estate agent said that an apartment listing that would typically receive five applicants in total in a matter of weeks, instead received 1,000 applicants in one day on, I believe, Friday. So there's a huge need to build homes in Los Angeles right now, not just to rebuild burn areas, but in unburned areas. What do you think happens now? What do you hope happens now? I think what I hope is that this is a moment where Los Angeles can look at where it is situated as a city and begin to prepare for a future where this kind of event happens less

often. And let me just add something to the point you just made, which is that the government is prepared to suspend Sequa, to suspend a set of environmental laws to expedite rebuilding in these parts of the city that are at what we would call the wildland urban interface. In the palisades, potentially in Altadena, right? These parts of the city are where the city has grown out from beyond the basin into where it's mixed in with brushland, into natural land, into more kind of open parkland. Where there are not fires right now are in the densest core of the city. And one potential future for the city is to increase the number of people living in the,

in the dense core of the city, away from that wild land, away from the parts of the city that are more likely to burn. But right now, there are all sorts of restrictions and limits on where you can build and how you can build. And Siqua, right, the local environmental law will not be suspended for those parts of the city. And so, yes, it's great that they're going to rebuild there. And I think one thing about the palisades especially is that there's almost nothing you can do to keep people from wanting to live there. The state could potentially try to start coaxing people out of the region by offering a Bible. program by offering various, you know, house to green acres types of programs. But there's very

little you can do to coax people entirely out of that area or to convince people that they don't want to live there. It's just so beautiful. What you could do is have a lot more people to build a lot more housing in the parts of the city that are less likely to burn and get more people into the city overall to kind of help its housing shortage and to reduce. fire exposure risk in the future. Ending on insurance, California's insurance situation seems borderline disastrous to me, but I don't consider myself an insurance expert at all. So I wonder what you're seeing here.

We've got a state that is manifestly in line for repeated fire risk, especially to, as you put it, the wildlife urban interface. In 1988, California voters passed Proposition 103, which restricts insurance rate increases. And among other things, this has caused some insurers to pull out of the state because they can't charge what they think their policy premium should be worth. You'd like to think that the public sector could cat premium and create a kind of perfect catastrophic insurance pool that helps everybody in the event of an emergency. But that takes money, and it leaves us with something like the Fair Plan, which is the state's insurer of last resort, which will be incredibly stressed

in order to help people without higher taxes or federal bailout. Let me just get to the most dramatic question very quickly. Is it hyperbolic to worry that California is on the road to becoming uninsurable? I think it is not hyperbolic to worry that California is on the road to becoming uninsurable. I think where I have some trepidation here is that the issue in the state, is this nexus of, right, a private service, which is insurance and public policy. Lots and lots and lots of people want to live in California. And there are lots of parts of the state that are not going to burn. The question is really how can the state spread out?

First of all, the costs from this disaster. And second of all, the costs from all of the places where it faces extreme wildfire risk across the state and how do you have people living in, let's say, the downtown core of Los Angeles or the downtown core of San Francisco, where they're much less likely to face fire risk, how much do they need to subsidize people living at this wildland urban interface? Going forward, what concerns me, I think the question about a state becoming uninsurable seems a little bit like, I suppose to me that it becomes unclear what exactly that would mean. And here I'm talking to you both as Rob Guest and also like his Rob fellow person. Like, so many people want to live in California. The much more likely

outcome from this disaster, right, is that costs from this, the $20 to $50 billion of costs from this disaster gets spread out. They get socialized somehow. And insurance prices begin to adjust for the true cost of living in California and the true wildfire risk that people face there. And we see the cost of home ownership in California go precipitously up. The question I have is that the state's already facing a housing shortage. There's huge demand for the structures that already exist in California. There's huge demand to live in California because it's not only extremely beautiful and the weather there's perfect, but a land of great economic opportunity.

So how does that housing demand meet the rising cost of living in California, of owning and managing a structure in California? That's what I feel like I don't understand at all. And that's why there's a tendency in climate coverage, and especially around California, to talk about the state as on the brink of a disaster, on the brink of some kind of apocalypse that this kind of lifestyle is only possible because Doom is right around the corner. And it reminds me a little bit of like what Fran Leebowitz says about New York,

which is no one can afford to live in New York, but somehow 8 million people do. The most likely outcome, right, is just that like things get worse and more expensive. And so I think our focus should not be as much on doom scenarios because people are going to continue to live in California as on what can we do to improve the state? what can we do to make the state a cheaper place for people to live?

What I worry about when we ask questions, like, is the state about to become insurable? Is, yes, there's about to be a crisis of public finance in the state? But, like, what can be done to, on a forward-looking basis, not only to manage the crisis that's happening right now, but to create more housing in the walkable parts of the state, so that, yes, maybe it costs more to manage a property in the state, you don't need a car. What can we do to bring down costs of infrastructure in the state so that,

yes, you have to pay more in home insurance, but your taxes are, you know, less pressing or the public, you know, the public expenditures from the state are less pressing. It feels like this should be a moment to look at the great demand for people to live in California and live in Los Angeles, despite all the problems and all the hazards of life there and say, okay, how can we actually begin to build society here that's designed for this particular place with this particular risk profile and not like, oh, well, you know, our first, the first three things we tried, building the same type of houses as we build everywhere else in the U.S., right, building the same kind of car dependent infrastructure as we build in the suburbs,

having a public transit system that doesn't really work. All of that didn't really work. And so, oh, it's uninsurable. Things don't work because human life will continue in California. And I guess this is like the breakdown that I have been feeling as I read and report on the state, which is like things will continue after this crisis. And so let's start planning for what a post-crisis California looks like and what a California that's more resilient looks like.

because it's not going to look like a California with fewer people in it. Or, I mean, it might look like a California with fewer people in it, but that would represent a policy failure because even with all these disasters, millions and millions of people still want to live in California, and people moving away from California still want to live in California. And so the state should use this as a chance to, you know, build a more sustainable enduring society rather than look at the financial structures that's built so far and kind of throw up its hands.

I think it's a fair answer. Is that? Is that? No, look, my values are here. I love California. I want to make California more and more and more livable. I love going out there, family out there, friends out there. I love it.

It's possible but difficult to balance the following values. A, reduce the cost of living, especially for the middle and lower class. B, allow people to live where they want to live. If you want to rebuild the palisades, rebuild Malibu, it's gorgeous. It's gorgeous. just there. Of course they should be able to rebuild where they've lived in some cases for decades. But three, you want to have a home insurance program that works for the poor and the rich, right? You have to find a way that allows premium to rise maybe in the super high income wildlife urban

interface while also recognizing that maybe that just means the cost of living in the palisades just has to go up with the insurance risk being captured by those insurance premium. But at the same time, I want to think about, and we're not going to solve it here, but think about creative ways to allow the working class to live close to the wildlife urban interface because they're often going to have to for the economic opportunities of working in the malls out there and the retail out there and the healthcare industry out there.

And you want to restrain cost of living in downtown Los Angeles as well. And so balancing all of those values at the same time, right? cost of living reductions and allowing people to live where they want to live freedom and a rational home insurance program that isn't on the brink of blowing up with with every fire. It's a difficult set of values to hold in equilibrium. That's just that's where the question comes from. I think one story that I think of when we talk about this is that yes, obviously if people want to live in the palisades, their home insurance needs to reflect the risk of living in the palisades. And the Palisades, Malibu, even Ventura, these are some of the most beautiful places along the coast.

There are some of the most beautiful places in the world. People are going to want to live there no matter what they do. My colleague Matthew Zitland pointed out that in videos of people returning to the destroyed structure of their homes, to their homes return to cinders, these homeowners literally cannot prevent themselves from observing how beautiful it is nonetheless. Even at this moment of maximum destruction, this is such a beautiful problem. part of the world that people are completely, you can't help but notice it, it remains beautiful even in this moment of total ruin. Home insurance, right, needs to get more expensive there and needs to fully reflect the costs of living there. I think one tale, one story I've been thinking

about came from the climate reporter Jake Biddle, who's at Grist, who talked about an earlier fire in California, which destroyed both a very high-end neighborhood, kind of comparable to the palisades, and then also a more middle-class neighborhood. And our instinct is that the high-end neighborhood is the one that would get rebuilt faster, right? That the rich people with more resources are the ones who would put together their community faster, and this community would be more resilient. But what it turned out was that it was actually the middle-class neighborhood that came back much, much faster than the high-end neighborhood. And that's because the middle-class neighborhood,

construction companies could come in and they could build more of the same type of home on the property. That home could meet code much more easily, could meet the new fire codes much more easily. The insurance payouts that people got often covered those costs of construction and new construction for the money they got was able to kind of meet reproduce or even exceed the structure that existed there previously. It was in the high-end areas where millionaires live,

where they were trying to build custom structures, where they were trying to build exactly the structure or a version of the structure that stood there before, where they were trying to do something architecturally interesting or custom with the structure, where it took much longer to rebuild. And that's actually because these people had more resources. They had second homes.

They wanted these structures. to represent something about them. There wasn't the same ability for a builder to come in and make a lot of cookie cutter, you know, or standardized homes. And so it actually took much longer for the high-end neighborhood to come back from a fire than for the middle-class neighborhood to come back.

I'm just throwing that out there because I think, which isn't, you know, this is not to say that I think that's exactly what's going to happen in Los Angeles, but that I think we just don't know exactly what rebuilding from these structures look like and that going forward living in the most costly areas where it's the wildfire risk

is highest and where it's hardest to fight fires needs to reflect the cost of living there. But also that we just never know exactly what rebuilding will look like and how some of our basic intuitions about what it might look like are actually belied by what actually happens. Yeah, we're talking about the future here and I think the future should be talked about,

but Los Angeles is still in flames, right? Disaster rarely unfolds exactly how you'd expect, and to take your final point to heart, disaster rebuilding rarely unfolds the way you'd expect. There's a lot of unknowns here, and this is an early chapter of a really, really important part of California's history in America's.

So thank you, Rob, for walking us through this. I've learned a lot. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Many thanks to Rob Meyer from HeatMap. One thing to remember for me this episode is the difference between this fire and most California fires that we hear about. Most California fires in northern, central California, these are forest fires. And so reducing the risk requires thinning those forests, maybe by millions of acres annually. But when we're talking about the chaparral, the brushland, the scrub land of Southern California, it requires a different strategy.

It's possible, in fact, that traditional control and thinning isn't going to be sufficient to reduce the risk, even reduce the inevitability of future fires in these areas. And that should probably shift our attention from the wildfire side of this divide to the urban side of the wildland urban interface, as we repeatedly refer to it. And that means looking at the homes, looking at the properties, retrofitting roofs and walls and finding new materials to build houses out of and thinking about the gaps between plants, vegetation, and the homes themselves, it also might mean, I think, while I want anyone who wants to live in Malibu to rebuild in Malibu, anyone who wants to live in the Palisades, live in the Palisades, these are not places, largely speaking, for Los Angeles' middle class. And if we want to make it easier for more people to live an affordable middle class life in Los Angeles, that means, I think, reducing

restrictions and regulations that hold back the construction of housing in downtown and southern Los Angeles. I think that adding more houses in the South is going to allow more people to live in Los Angeles and live safely in Los Angeles. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you Friday.