Authored by William L. Anderson via The Mises Institute,
Much has been written about the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, including articles on this page and other libertarian sites. After several days of uncontrolled fire and destruction, we are very familiar with the governmental failures that have led to this current crisis. Progressivism is the guiding star of both California’s state government and local governments in the highly populated regions on the state’s Pacific Coast, and progressive policies have all but guaranteed this latest disaster.
Governing ideologies matter and matter greatly. The former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would not have been as repressive as they were without guiding ideologies of their political leadership. Modern progressivism, while not as virulent and violent as the German and Soviet regimes, operates with a similar utopian worldview to repressive ideological regimes, and people living under progressive governments pay a serious price.
California’s governance has been ultra-progressive for more than a decade and cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have become the poster children for failed progressive regimes. Democrats hold a 3-1 edge over Republicans in both state houses, while the California congressional delegations in the US House and Senate are dominated by the Democratic Party, which has won almost all the statewide elections for office in the past 30 years. Democrats hold a supermajority in both houses of the state legislature, which means Republicans cannot mount a challenge to any policies favored by Democrats.
Not surprisingly, California’s legislation is highly progressive, from the setting of high minimum wages to environmental policies, all of which impose huge costs on Californians that people in most other states don’t directly experience. Likewise, Los Angeles and San Francisco also have progressive governments that place leftist ideology over the nuts and bolts of ordinary governance.
Like most progressives, California’s lawmakers and activists believe that they can accomplish whatever they wish through legislation and coercion. When people in California believed that insurance rates were “too high,” they pushed through Proposition 103, which, according to Connor O’Keeffe, “severely decoupled” insurance rates from risk, which encouraged more building in fire-prone areas. On top of that, California’s insurance commissioner, Ricardo Lara, has announced a one-year moratorium on insurance cancellations, which means insurance companies cannot cancel a homeowner’s policy even if they are in a fire-prone area.
By forcing the few insurance companies that still write policies in California to offer below-cost premiums in places where wildfires are likely to happen, the state is all-but-forcing these companies into bankruptcy, as the claims in the latest fires certainly will out-strip whatever revenues they received from premiums. Given that the estimated damages are likely to be the highest ever from a wildfire, perhaps more than $20 billion, this will affect insurance companies across the nation.
Not surprisingly, California’s politicians and others are blaming “climate change” for what has happened and one expects to see future lawsuits against energy companies, claiming that they have caused warming that is responsible for the current spate of wildfires in California and elsewhere. However, the real culprits are California officials themselves and the legal and regulatory straightjackets they have created that prevent people from taking the necessary actions to abate fire risks.
Elizabeth Weil, writing in ProPublica, points out that more than a century of fire suppression in California forests has created conditions that when fires start, they turn into conflagrations:
The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
However, both the National Environmental Policy Act and California air quality laws, among others, make it extremely difficult to do anything to mitigate the damage done from fire suppression. As always, California governance has created perverse incentives that ensure that forest management necessary to prevent huge fires will not happen. Writes Weil:
The paydays can turn incentives upside down. “Every five, 10, 15 years, we’ll see an event where a firefighter who wants [to earn] overtime starts a fire,” said Crystal Kolden, a self-described “pyrogeographer” and assistant professor of fire science in the Management of Complex Systems Department at the University of California, Merced. (She first picked up a drip torch in 1999 when working for the U.S. Forest Service and got hooked.) “And it sort of gets painted as, ‘Well, this person is just completely nuts.’ And, you know, they maybe are.” But the financial incentives are real. “It’s very lucrative for a certain population of contractors.”
By comparison, planning a prescribed burn is cumbersome. A wildfire is categorized as an emergency, meaning firefighters pull down hazard pay and can drive a bulldozer into a protected wilderness area where regulations typically prohibit mountain bikes. Planned burns are human-made events and as such need to follow all environmental compliance rules. That includes the Clean Air Act, which limits the emission of PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, from human-caused events. In California, those rules are enforced by CARB, the state’s mighty air resources board, and its local affiliates. “I’ve talked to many prescribed fire managers, particularly in the Sierra Nevada over the years, who’ve told me, ‘Yeah, we’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars to get all geared up to do a prescribed burn,’ and then they get shut down.” Maybe there’s too much smog that day from agricultural emissions in the Central Valley, or even too many locals complain that they don’t like smoke. Reforms after the epic 2017 and 2018 fire seasons led to some loosening of the CARB/prescribed fire rules, but we still have a long way to go.
California has a Mediterranean climate, which means hot, dry summers and a rainy season in winter. The state heavily depends upon the snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades which help keep the state’s reservoirs full. The mountains of Southern California have sagebrush on the lower slopes and pine in the higher elevations, both of which are highly-flammable. Furthermore, the famed Santa Ana winds which blast off the Nevada desert to the east can turn the mountains and hills in the Los Angeles area into a tinderbox, and that is what happened with the recent fires.
Understand that this disaster was preventable. This is not a situation in which climate change has made disasters inevitable. Geographer Gilbert White famously wrote, “Floods are ‘acts of God’, but flood losses are largely acts of man.” Likewise, we can say the same about wildfires. Just as communities can take measures to prevent or mitigate flood damage, so can they take similar measures to deal with the fire threats.
To protect communities from wildfires, forests, grasslands, and other areas where dry vegetation exists must be well-managed, with controlled burns or removal of brush, blowdowns, and other materials that can turn regular fires into conflagrations. But that also means not subsidizing people who move into fire-prone areas, as is the case in California. Writes Jack Nicastro:
Though many factors contributed to the devastation (such as fire hydrants without water, too few controlled burns, and insurance price controls), it was also exacerbated by land-use policies that pushed homes and residents away from the city center and closer to the wildland-urban interface (WUI). The U.S. Fire Administration defines the WUI as “the zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development…where structures…intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels.”
The U.S. Forest Service’s 2020 national assessment includes the Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and most of L.A. County abutting the surrounding hills in the WUI. In 2005, the Forest Service reported that California had 5.1 million housing units in the WUI—the most in the nation. The number of housing units in the WUI has only increased since, including 140,000 subsidized by the state.
People living in the East where there is year-round rainfall and high humidity can have their cabin in the woods, given the low probability of huge forest fires. Furthermore, most eastern land is privately owned. However, the western US not only has an arid climate, but also about half of the land there is owned by the federal government, and the federal government owns about 48 percent of the land in California.
Because of federal and state fire suppression policies and political control of those lands by environmentalists, it is nearly impossible to apply wise land use policies that would prevent huge forest and woodlands fires. Likewise, with zoning laws in California pushing people into areas where wildfires are inevitable, progressive policies combine to place lives and property in danger.
Unfortunately, while we are clearly aware of the problem, a political solution is unattainable as long as progressives control policy in California. It is easier for California politicians to blame Exxon for these catastrophes than to admit that their progressive land-use policies for more than a century have been an unmitigated disaster.
