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Commentary

California Wildfires: Climate Change Symptom, or Consequence of Bad Policy?

January 11, 2025

Southern California wildfires continue to blaze out of control, besieging the Los Angeles basin from the north and west. Fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and elsewhere ran dry as firemen strove to defend entire neighborhoods all at once. Hurricane-force winds and an unusually dry winter have already taken 10 lives and destroyed thousands of buildings — including celebrity homes — in what may be the costliest wildfire season to date.

Some celebrities have vented their frustration against the governing officials who presided over this disaster. “We pay the highest taxes in California,” complained actress Sara Foster. “Our fire hydrants were empty. Our vegetation was overgrown, brush not cleared. Our reservoirs were emptied by our governor because tribal leaders wanted to save fish. Our fire department budget was cut by our mayor.” Sarah Michelle Gellar wrote, “City of LA you want everyone to evacuate yet you have complete gridlock and not one traffic cop on the roads helping.”

Blaming Climate Change

But some Hollywood elites chose to blame climate change instead. “This climate crisis is brought to you by climate deniers and venal corporate greed,” exclaimed director Jim Jarmusch, while presenting a screenplay award in New York City.

It isn’t just Hollywood that shares this view. Writing in The Guardian, a mainstream U.K. newspaper, American meteorologist Eric Holthaus declared that “The Los Angeles wildfires are climate disasters compounded.” The New York Times echoed the argument, “climate change brings more challenging fire conditions,” to excuse the empty fire hydrants.

On this theory, government officials responsible for planning for and responding to wildfires are helpless victims of circumstances just as much as the residents whose homes are consumed by the flames. Fire hydrants failed because “the pumping systems that feed them could not keep pace with the demand,” suggested the same Times article. “Those who designed the system did not account for the stunning speeds at which multiple fires would race through the Los Angeles area this week.” The insinuation is that these officials could not have accounted for the speed of these fires because the blame rests on climate change.

Holthaus likewise de-personalized the responsibility for fire containment, foreseeing “an emerging era of compound events — simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year … that overwhelm our ability to respond.”

At its root, these arguments make government officials out to be the victim of a larger, systemic issue: climate change. But this does not get them off the hook. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that global temperatures are rising and will generate more severe weather, shouldn’t government officials tasked with disaster preparedness be preparing for that?

It’s tempting to blame this government victimhood mentality on the recent trend toward victimhood politics. But this sinful behavior is as old as human nature. In 1 Samuel 22:6-23, Saul’s suspicions provoked him to massacre the priests serving in the tabernacle, as he blamed the consequences of his murderous paranoia on others. The author presents a positive contrast in David, who shouldered blame he did not deserve as a means of caring for the lowly.

Managing Expectations

It’s worth noting that the ecology of southern California makes it especially susceptible to wildfires. According to the county fire department, “most watersheds in Los Angeles County” are covered in “chaparral,” drought-resistant hillside shrubbery that contains flammable oils and produces large amounts of dead material. “Chaparral plant communities depend on fire as an integral part of their life cycle, and periodic burning is essential for these communities to rejuvenate,” the fire department says.

In addition to this flammable brush, other conditions prime southern California for wildfires. Seasonal Santa Ana winds (hot and dry) blow from the desert at high speeds. Average annual rainfall for Los Angeles County is 14.25 inches, or just over one inch per month.

However, due to the surrounding mountains (which shed water quickly) and dense urbanization (resulting in lots of paved ground), Los Angeles County also faces substantial flood risks. City architects have responded to this threat with water infrastructure focused on dumping the water into the ocean as quickly as possible — which means that precious rainwater does not stick around to help combat wildfires. Both floods and wildfires can vary wildly in severity from year to year.

One final point to consider is that the dense urbanization of the scarce flat land in Los Angeles presses people to build their homes further into the hills and valleys — deeper into the flammable brush. This makes it more complicated to create fire barriers between the chaparral and people’s homes.

Deprioritizing Wildfire Management

Given these conditions that enhance the risk of wildfire, it behooves southern California officials to make fire prevention and suppression a priority. But in the Los Angeles Fire Department’s (LAFD) Strategic Plan for 2023-2026, “enhance[ing] community resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, and environmental sustainability” ranked seventh out of seven priorities — dead last. Much higher on the list was promoting a “progressive work environment” (second) and committing to “embrace[] diversity, equity, and inclusion” (third).

These priorities reflect the goal of LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley, touted as “the first female and LGBTQ Fire Chief in the LAFD.” Her bio goes on to state, “Creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity while striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the communities are Chief Crowley’s priorities, and she is grateful for the opportunity to serve the City of Los Angeles.”

I don’t know whether the LAFD has met its DEI goals. I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and say it has not met the expectations of the communities, which probably didn’t expect to see their city on fire in January.

Deprioritizing the Fire Department

The blame doesn’t all belong to Chief Crowley, however. In the 2025 fiscal year, which began on July 1, 2024, the LAFD’s budget was cut by $17.6 million. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) was responsible for setting the budget priorities and developing the budget.

Two days after the National Weather Service announced a high fire risk for Los Angeles on January 2, Bass flew to Ghana for the inauguration of the Ghanaian president. She did not arrive home until Wednesday afternoon.

When asked about her budget cuts during a Thursday press conference, Bass responded that “there were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days. … Money was allocated to be distributed later on.” An LAFD firefighter disagreed, telling FOX 11, “Sadly, the winds have been known for over a week, but staffing and budget cuts [don’t] allow to plan and prepare and pre-deploy as we should have.”

The cuts to the LAFD budget were not a casualty of budget-wide cost-cutting. They represented the second largest cut to any department (after street services), while other departments saw their funding increase. Recently, reporters have taken a magnifying glass to the Los Angeles budget, revealing a number of far less essential expenditures, focusing on racial and LGBT identities:

  • $100,000 to the Civil + Human Rights and Equity Department for a “Midnight Stroll Transgender Cafe,” whose purpose is to “support a safe haven for unsheltered transgender individuals in Hollywood”;
  • $100,000 from the Cultural Affairs Department Special Appropriations budget for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Awards;
  • $170,000 in total for “Social Justice Art-Worker Investments”;
  • $14,010 to the “Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles”;
  • $13,000 for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month Programs”;
  • $13,000 each for African American History Month, American Indian Heritage Month, Latino Heritage Month and Asian American History Month Programs;
  • $8,670 for the “One Institute the International Gay and Lesbian Archives.”

One ticket item the city did not invest in was upgrading the city’s water infrastructure, according to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Traci Park, whose district includes Pacific Palisades. “There are environmental catastrophes waiting to happen everywhere with our water mains,” she complained. “As our city has grown, we haven’t upgraded and expanded the infrastructure that we need to support it.”

Poor Long-Term Management

These close-up failures stand against a backdrop of California’s poor statewide allocation of its freshwater over the long-term. In short, northern California has more rainfall with fewer people, while southern California has more people but less rainfall, yet California has failed to develop an effective way to transport the water from north to south.

Environmentalists have opposed plans to channel the water through the state’s central delta out of concern for a palm-sized fish, the delta smelt. Under former governor Jerry Brown, California developed plans to drill two tunnels underneath the delta, to carry water southward. But when Governor Gavin Newsom (D) took office in 2019 he sent water officials back to the drawing board — again over environmental concerns. They developed a one-tunnel plan that would move less water, but it has not yet been built.

This means that northern California still has an abundance of water, while residents in southern California still have too little, even as they have to battle historic wildfires.

Additional long-term failures include insufficient attention to clearing away dead brush through controlled burns and slow movement on construction of half a dozen reservoirs that voters authorized in 2014 — none of which are yet in operation.

Insurance Price Controls

One final policy decision exacerbates the wildfire situation in southern California — this one made by the voters themselves. Proposition 103, passed in 1988, gives the California Department of Insurance power to approve insurance rates or even roll them back. This subjects insurance rates to a regulatory process that can take months or years. “Prop 103 is essentially price controls, “ explained R Street Institute western region director Steven Greenhut. “It puts the kibosh on the ability of insurance companies to adjust the rates to meet the market.”

After several years of costly California wildfires, it seems that insurance companies were not able to raise their rates high enough to cover their losses.

As a result, in March 2024, State Farm discontinued coverage for 72,000 houses and apartments in California. Also in 2024, Liberty Mutual announced it would not renew fire insurance for 17,000 California homes.

The result of this withdrawal by insurance companies is that, if an uninsured Californian loses their home in these massive wildfires, they will really lose everything, with no hope of rebuilding (unless the state of federal government steps in).

Progressives will blame greedy insurance corporations, but they fail to see how these decisions are the result of the bad incentives created by California’s own law. In a free market, prices are supposed to act as signals of underlying realities. But California kept the price of fire insurance artificially low, which did not allow the cost of insurance to properly signal the risk that fire posed to California homes. Artificially low insurance rates could not adequately deter people from risky investments — building expensive homes in fire-prone areas, which effectively made wildfires costlier than they otherwise would be. Insurance companies bore the brunt of this bad policy until they could do so no longer.

Conclusion

Thus, when the media or celebrities blame the California wildfires on climate change, there are many other factors they must overlook. Governmental officials are not passive victims, helplessly responding to overwhelming natural forces. Rather, government officials are tasked with foreseeing and adequately preparing for natural disasters. As natural disasters differ by area, so should government responses (which is why California houses are built to withstand earthquakes, while coastal properties are built on stilts to survive a storm surge).

Unfortunately, California officials at many levels failed to prepare for such wildfire, either in the short- or long-term. January 2025 may have brought the perfect storm of high winds and dry brush, but it was a storm that California should have been prepared for, and they weren’t.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.



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