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Jan. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
22:23
How California’s Policies Have Led to Uncontrollable Fires | Adam B. Summers | California Insider
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We noted that the state used to take a more proactive approach in doing things like fuel breaks and prescribed or controlled burns more often.
Over time, the state has kind of shifted more to suppression, which is fighting the fires once they actually ignite.
And I think part of that is just kind of political incentives because sending in ground crews throughout the year to clear out brush is, you know, it's not very sexy.
It's much easier for a politician to point and say, hey, look at these brave firefighters that are doing their job, which is great, and they do very heroic things, but they might not have to do so much of that if you take more preventative measures, which also tend to be less costly.
and the state has kind of gotten away from that.
California experienced the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in state history in the last few years.
Today I will sit down with Adam Summers.
Adam is a research fellow at the Independent Institute.
He previously worked as an editorial writer and columnist at the Orange County Register, and he was also a senior policy analyst at the Reason Foundation.
According to Adam and his team, California's policymakers are taking a more reactive approach to wildfire.
He will explain how the state can take a more proactive stance in dealing with fires to minimize their impact.
So Adam, it's great to have you on California Insider.
Welcome.
Thank you very much.
It's my pleasure.
So you and your colleagues published a paper a few months ago, and you actually predicted that fires are going to be a problem for us.
And I wanted to know, what was the premise behind writing this paper?
Well, the fires have been a problem for a number of years, as anyone here in Southern California and certain parts of Northern California as well has unfortunately experienced.
We have had some particularly bad fire seasons recently and we were struck kind of by the poor response of the government and some of the poor incentives facing the electricity utility monopolies and And so we decided this is something that needs to be addressed.
Of course the legislature up in Sacramento did as well.
They came to some different conclusions and we have some different approaches which I'm sure we can talk about.
But that was kind of the impetus for the study.
This is kind of a growing problem that isn't sufficiently being addressed.
Sure.
And how is your report different from what Sacramento was doing?
Well, Sacramento's approach is primarily just to throw more money at the problem and hope that it goes away and blame the utility companies.
And there is some blame to go around there, for sure.
But it's...
A lot of the problems were created by poor incentives based on government laws and regulations, poor response from CAL FIRE and other agencies, and a lot of those problems still remain.
Most of the focus recently has been on the utilities and kind of improving some of their safety measures, which is certainly needed, but there are a lot of other aspects that aren't being addressed.
So with the utilities, what are the measures that, what is the blame here?
We have had a lot of blackouts, and why are they getting blamed?
What are they not doing?
Well, part of the problem, I think a lot of the problem actually stems from the fact that they are government-protected monopolies.
If you go back maybe a hundred years or so, we actually had more of a free market in what are now considered public utilities, and you had a number of different Electric companies and gas companies and so forth serving the same markets.
But over time there became this kind of collusion between some of the larger companies and the government and some of these interests were able to carve out their own monopolies which were protected by the government and now it's kind of ubiquitous.
We see this all across the country and California is no different.
So we have the three big regional monopolies.
There's San Diego Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and Pacific Gas and Electric up north.
And the way they work is they basically have a guaranteed profit.
The government sets the prices.
And they're guaranteed a certain profit rate and then there's no competition, of course, since it's a monopoly.
And so they don't have the incentives to innovate and to worry about things like cost effectiveness because they can always just go to the utility commission and get them to pass rate increases on the consumers and the consumers have nowhere to go because there's no competition.
And so that's been some of the problem.
The state has compounded this by enforcing its own laws.
In particular, I think you have the cap-and-trade, which forces the companies to purchase credits for Ostensibly for pollution, but we also have the government dictating what kind of energy sources the utilities have to use,
and they have to use a greater and greater percentage of green energy sources, which are not necessarily the most efficient and tend to cost more in those drive-up rates.
And we have other policies where gas taxes are highest in the nation and so forth.
And so we have all of these policies that are driving up rates and no incentive to keep prices in check.
So then they cannot, because they're dealing with these policies, they cannot do what they need to do to make sure safety in case of fires, right?
Right.
I mean, public safety, particularly given the experience we've had over the last decade or so, In a competitive market, that would be a huge selling point.
Our company has very high safety standards and our equipment isn't going to burn down your house.
That would be a key point on which companies would compete in a free market in addition to price and service quality.
But you don't have that in a monopoly situation.
Now, you were mentioning about housing.
You had brought up something about housing.
If you can share more about it and the housing policies that have caused this.
Sure.
One of the largest reasons that we've seen more destruction from fires in recent years is simply that more people are moving to riskier areas in the rural areas and the exurbs outside the suburbs that tend to have more fire risk.
And a lot of that is driven by, again, policies that increase the price of housing in this case.
And so you've got zoning regulations that limit the amount of land that can be developed, and that drives up prices.
You've got, in California, this is at the local level, there are a lot of development fees that may be Three and a half times the national average, and so we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars added to the price of a house just from development fees alone.
You have things like prevailing wage laws, which require union wage scales for home builders, and that can increase prices another 25 to 30 percent in just your labor costs.
Here in California, we have the California Environmental Quality Act, Which offers a very burdensome process for getting through the various environmental reviews.
It subjects developments to lots of lengthy and costly litigation, oftentimes for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment.
And so all of these things serve to increase the cost of housing and kind of push people out into these more risky areas.
And then on top of that, we also have the state intervening in home insurance policies because the insurers will say while they're allowed to charge higher prices in riskier areas, the insurers are complaining that the state will not The state still caps the prices and they're not allowing the insurers to charge the full risk-based rates that they normally should charge.
So if you're living in a riskier area, much riskier area for fires, you wouldn't pay for the risk.
Is that what they have done?
Yeah, not fully anyway.
And so you're effectively subsidizing this insurance, which encourages more people to move into these riskier areas.
You've seen in some places where insurers just aren't even willing to write policies anymore.
It's just too risky for them.
And that should be a sign that you shouldn't be building and living in those areas.
But when you have this essential subsidization by keeping the rates lower, again, you're kind of courting disaster by encouraging people to move into riskier areas.
And they might not even have the knowledge that those areas are risky because they're able to afford it.
Where in a free market you either might not be able to afford it because it would be so expensive or it might be so risky that the company just wouldn't be willing to write a policy at all.
Do you have an example of one of these areas that have been built?
One good example from the last couple of years, in the Malibu area, a lot of the times you have fires that will start kind of inland and then they'll sweep all the way down to the coast.
And we see even...
And Malibu is kind of an interesting example because you have a lot of celebrities, you know, that are being displaced because of the fires and they'll send tweets out, you know, saying, you know, I think, what was it, LeBron James that was saying, you know, I had to, he was looking for a hotel to stay in and he couldn't find anywhere to stay because he had to move his, evacuate his family from his house.
And so it was kind of like, you know, welcome to Southern California, LeBron.
So that's one example.
And, you know, part of this is just kind of the natural weather conditions and topography of California.
You have, you know, large, steep mountain slopes, and you've got Santa Ana winds, or up north, they're called the Diablo winds, that come through these passes.
And, I mean, you...
There's only so much you can do when that happens.
So you have to stay out of these areas.
These policies have caused people to live in these areas.
Right.
Or be willing to pay substantial costs to protect those places.
Now what about the brushes, the proactive work?
I mean, you guys had focused a lot on proactive work.
And this proactive work is not getting done for certain reasons.
What are those reasons?
Well, one thing we noted in our Golden Fleece report, which is kind of our kind of waste reports that we do on the state of California agencies from time to time, we noted that the state used to take a more proactive approach in doing things like Fuel breaks and prescribed or controlled burns more often.
And over time, the state has kind of shifted more to suppression, which is fighting the fires once they actually ignite.
And I think part of that is just kind of political incentives because, you know, Sending in ground crews throughout the year to clear out brush is, you know, it's not very sexy.
It's much easier for a politician to point, say, hey, look at these brave firefighters that are doing their job, which is great, and they do very heroic things, but they might not have to do so much of that if you take more preventative measures, which also tend to be less costly.
And the state has kind of gotten away from that.
There was a bill a couple years ago.
It was, I remember, it was Assembly Bill 1054, I think.
And they did start to dedicate some more money.
I think it was $200 million over five years from the cap and trade funds.
That they're going to dedicate to doing some more preventative maintenance.
So that's a good step, but it's something we haven't been doing nearly enough.
Environmental regulations also play into this.
For example, the air quality boards have a tremendous amount of power.
And one thing that I found interesting, I was reading a report from the Little Hoover Commission, which is kind of this independent watchdog agency for California.
And they had done this report, I think it was called Fire on the Mountain, and they were talking about how California suffered for really about a century of just kind of not actively managing forests and allowing more overgrowth in forests and so forth.
But one of the things that they said that was kind of interesting was the When the state does its, you know, it's very particular about the pollution counts and so forth, and the air quality boards are responsible for managing this.
Now, when there's a wildfire, that doesn't count towards, you know, the state's pollution because, you know, there are a lot of emissions that are created from wildfires, but those aren't counted when the state tries to do its accounting for emissions.
But the air quality boards do count when you do a controlled burn.
You have to count those emissions towards the state cap or whatever.
And so it discourages doing these controlled burns, which is a terrible incentive to have.
So what are these controlled burns?
Well a controlled burn would just be where you would go into an area when weather conditions are not risky and you would kind of clear out a lot of the undergrowth just by allowing the fire to sweep through in a So you start the fire?
Yeah they will start the fire and just use it to clear out some of the brush and not let it get out of hand basically so that when you do have a larger fire later on you don't have so much of the tinder to make it that much worse.
In some of my research, one of the interesting things I learned is that not all trees are the same.
You think of the growth in the forest in particular, but when you're not managing the forest and clearing out some of this overgrowth, what happens is you have such a high concentration of trees in a small location, they're competing for water and other resources and things, And it makes the trees weaker and more susceptible to drought and to bark beetle infestations.
It also allows more trees that are less fire resistant to grow up in there.
And so when a fire does sweep through, it's much more destructive because you have these less fire resistant trees that are, you know, kind of serving as torches and spreading the embers that much more.
You know, there's been, and this has been kind of an environmental focus towards, you know, leaving things in a natural state.
And the irony there is that you have actually weakened the forests and made them more susceptible to, as I say, the drought and the beetle infestations and damage from the wildfires.
And more trees will die than otherwise would have as a result.
So would the environmental focus, the special interests that have that focus, are they against cleaning these brushes as well?
Largely, yeah.
They are certainly against logging measures.
They've gone head-to-head with the logging industry for quite a long time in California, and they've largely won.
The logging industry has been pretty decimated.
Interestingly enough, another benefit of the logging industry is that when they clear out, not only are they clearing out some of the trees, they're also creating fire roads, essentially.
They have their roads to get in and out, but they serve as fire roads as well, which increases access for firefighters if they do have to go in there and could serve as a fuel break as well.
Now, you had mentioned about one thing that I saw very interesting was that when private landowners, they want to do cleaning, if they wanted to do control burns or if they wanted to do cleaning of their own properties, they face challenges, right?
Is there a process for that for them?
Yeah, generally you have to get a permit from the Air Quality Control Board.
And they have some certain measures.
Of course, they don't let you do burns on days when it's going to be dry and windy, you know, red flag kind of conditions, which is sensible.
They go a bit too far in just making the hurdles so high that it is very difficult for private landowners to do their own maintenance on their own property.
So the point I'm getting here is that In some cases, the environmentalists are trying to help us, but at the same time, when we have these fires, and I heard last year we had 68 tons of emissions of CO2, which is equal to how much the utility companies produce every year.
And this is damaging the environment a lot more than we probably have expected.
Saved and helped the environment in the last year.
What are your thoughts on this?
Do you think they are making progress with these policies?
Well, not really.
As I say, the big focus has been, in the last couple of years anyway, in Sacramento, has been kind of shoring up the utilities equipment, because some of the fires have started from equipment that has sparked due to maybe a tree limb knocking down a A utility pole in high winds or something and it hits the ground and sparks come
out and that's how the fire ignites.
But the problem with that approach is that that's only really a small percentage of how fires start.
And there are some things that we can't control like lightning strikes.
There are other things Most of the fires are started by human causes and some of this could be from, for example, a car fire on the side of the road that kind of sparks the adjacent hillside or people carelessly flicking out cigarette butts or campers or homeless encampments that have fires that get out of control.
And then, of course, there are arsonists as well.
And so by kind of singularly focusing, at least in the legislature, on utilities, you're really missing a large part of the fires that start, which is getting back to taking a more...
Proactive approach to brush clearing and fire breaks and so forth, and then kind of these more free market policies that allow people to afford housing in less risky areas, for example.
Those things all come into play, and those things would all make the fires less destructive, regardless of what the source is.
Sometimes it's better to just let a fire burn if it's out in a remote area and it's not going to be a threat to lives or property.
Currently, we still try to knock those down as soon as possible, but sometimes it's better to let nature take its course and kind of clear out some of the forests or grasslands or so forth so there isn't so much tinder for the next fire.
Okay, great.
Thank you.
Thank you for being on.
Sure.
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