There are two competing narratives about the causes of the tremendous destruction of buildings and lives that the recent Southern California fires have wreaked. One group of people blames the destruction on climate change. Another group blames it on bad government policy that has nothing to do with climate.
Which side is more correct? The second side. Even if we take as given the idea that climate change has caused fires to be more destructive, governments at all three levels—federal, state, and local—have implemented policies that caused the Southern California fires to be much more destructive than they would have been. Moreover, there is little evidence that climate change was a major cause of the fires.
This is from David R. Henderson, “California Burning: Causes and the Way Forward,” Defining Ideas, January 30, 2025.
And:
Let’s say you that you believe that climate change, a.k.a. global warming, has made fires more extreme. If you think that, doesn’t it follow that you should prepare for such fires? It’s not as if we’re totally helpless. So, let’s consider the various claims about human causes. When I was earning my PhD in economics at UCLA, many professors’ favorite way of posing a question on an exam was to make a statement and ask us to say whether it was true, false, or uncertain. That’s how I’ll evaluate the main claims.
I look at the role of Mayor Karen Bass’s absence, the water system, the fire department (alleged) cuts, fire department personnel, trimming back brush, and the role of climate change.
Another excerpt:
I conclude, therefore, that the claim about the empty Santa Ynez Reservoir being a major cause is uncertain.
But here is what’s true. Governments tend to neglect long-term improvements in infrastructure. Why? Incentives. Government managers of government assets have little incentive to preserve and improve them. If they do it well, they capture none of the value they create. If they do it badly, they lose almost nothing. At worst, they get fired, and that’s not even a given. Think of how often we hear about government bureaucracies failing spectacularly, with the bureaucrats in charge holding on to their jobs while taking no pay cuts. Even worse, sometimes legislatures react to bureaucratic failures by giving the bureaucracies more power and bigger budgets. Private owners, by contrast, have a strong incentive to preserve and improve assets.
Then I look at how government regulation will hamper recovery.
Read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
Craig
Jan 31 2025 at 6:50pm
One of the issues I see is that many like to point fingers for political gain, to politically defame the other side. Of course the natural response to such criticism is reflexively defensive. Of course in this day and age there is no truth, only narratives.
Mactoul
Jan 31 2025 at 10:09pm
You prove too much. If govt tend to neglect long-term improvements then what about great infrastructural programs of China, India, high-speed rail networks of Europe. Indeed, highway network of America itself was a government program.
There is something specific about the California fires which doesn’t really lend itself to broad generalizations about government.
steve
Feb 1 2025 at 1:02am
By my readings it looks mostly like the wind is the big culprit. 80 mph winds plus a drought meant any fire started would spread. I think people underestimate the power of nature. If you have lived through a hurricane or a flood you realize the kind of forces at play. Yes, you could build a water system with pumps adequate to pump water uphill to Palisades in large enough quantities, but the cost would be huge*. Private owners might have incentive to improve but looking at photos taken before the fires the place was full of gardens and wooden decks. Brush between property lines wasn’t cleared.
Anyway, if you read the people who arent just parroting talking points to blame the other tribe, climate change is a factor, but not the major one. It may have played a part in the drought but not so much with the winds.
* Need to see after action reports, but talking with engineer friends it sounds like the issue was not so much water but the inability to pump enough to the places it needed to go especially since so much of it was uphill.
TMC
Feb 1 2025 at 2:58pm
I’ve heard of these complaints of not maintaining the forests for over 10 years now. Nothing was unpredictable, even the winds. Rogan’s story is crazy how specifically right it was. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=603654835546431
Alan Goldhammer
Feb 1 2025 at 7:41am
I grew up in SoCal and was familiar with the Santa Ana winds. We once played a football game during one in early October and the gametime temp at night was 105 degrees. I never remembered Santa Ana winds in January nor ones that had the velocity as those that hampered fire fighters. Whether this was attributable to climate change or not is irrelevant, as it was likely a Black Swan event (coupled with almost no rainfall for the past six months). My own bias is that we are going through climate change, but confirmation will require more data but precaution is the order of the day.
We will continue to see property casualty companies either request higher premiums or exit this market. Both of the heavily burned areas had older housing stock that lacked fire retardant building materials. Look for this to change as the areas are rebuilt.
Clearing vegetation is complicated with the many canyons in the LA area. I’ve been watching reruns of ‘The Rockford Files’ and you can see lots of these areas when Rockford (James Garner) is driving around or in car chase scenes. This is not a simple task. Quickly spreading fires such as these are terribly difficult to control.
steve
Feb 1 2025 at 11:19am
People have not been cutting back brush for hundreds of years. IIRC, its only fairly recently that cutting back brush has been funded by the govt and AFAICT its not required or enforced very well for private residencies looking at photos. Yet the area has had many fires without this kind of spread. The last 2 record setting fires I could find were in 2008 and 1961. Both of those were accompanied by major wind per reports.
I think you can try requiring that people rebuild with fire resistant materials and outlaw outdoor decks, etc. But it looks to me like you only get the conditions that lead to this kind of fire very, very rarely. People just wont pay for or build for events that occur so rarely. Rather, they will, but only for a while. After 50 years without a major fire they will stop paying and then when conditions are right the next time they will have a big fire.
Steve
MarkW
Feb 1 2025 at 10:16am
It seems that the one bit of good news out of this is that there is a lot individual property owners can do in terms of fire resistant construction/retrofitting and landscaping. The Getty Villa survived for this reason as did a number of individual homes. The way forward seems to lie in following all of these best practices when rebuilding. I expect this will happen despite all of the political grandstanding
Jose Pablo
Feb 1 2025 at 8:37pm
Determining how much money makes sense to spend on preventing long recurrence-period events is a tricky question—especially in the aftermath of such an event. One key aspect of the analysis is the recurrence period, which tends to be grossly underestimated right after the event has occurred.
In reality, the merit of these analyses is best evaluated ex-ante. Ex-post assessments are subject to the benefit of hindsight and are often unfair to those who made decisions ex-ante.
How much are we willing to spend to prevent a meteor from striking the Earth? An almost certain event given enough time. And if, despite our efforts, the meteor still hits, how much blame should be assigned to insufficient spending, how much to flaws in the prevention system’s design, and how much to failures in execution? Note that all of these “failures” have a non-zero probability, even when executed to the best of our human capabilities.
Blaming global warming is even more problematic. Even if human-made CO₂ emissions have reduced the recurrence period of events like the Palisades and Eaton fires, those very same emissions have also generated significant historical utility. From a rational perspective, such fires might still have been a price worth paying in exchange for the benefits that CO₂ emissions have already provided.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to how we assess the historical and future benefits of CO₂ emissions and estimate the potential increase in future damages, as well as our time preferences—and these estimates and preferences, are not only time variable but can also change significantly from one individual to another.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Feb 1 2025 at 11:45pm
Wat does it mean in a highly interactive system t say which variable is MOST important. With less change in the weather, backward-looking insurance misgrgulation woud be less costly, maybe it should not even BE mis-regulation. But insurance pricing that was forward looking might have led to lower value but better protected assets located in fire prone zones, Ditto CO2 accumulation and fuel removal.