David Wallace Wells has a typically vivid report,
“Reckoning with the Scale of California Wildfires”
keying off the new “Franklin” fire, exacerbated by Santa Ana winds of up to 95 mph.
“No one will ever be honest about this,” the environmental historian and leftist Mike Davis told me a few years ago, “but firefighters have never stopped a wildfire powered by Santa Ana winds. All you can hope for is that the wind will change.”
The fire, however, is not a fluke.
“Of the nine largest fires in modern California history, every single one has been since 2017, as have three of the five deadliest. According to some analysis, 2.6 million homes in the state are at moderate or high risk of wildfire”
Wallace-Wells does not draw many policy conclusions from his report, so I will.
1. “[The fire] tore through Malibu land that had gone up in smoke as recently as 2007, threatening homes that had been rebuilt in the burn scar of that year’s Corral fire.”
How were these rebuilt properties able to get insurance for such a risky site? Did insurers not use the latest and best weather-climate modeling to assess the risk of fire here? Taking precautions building in less “desirable” locations, guided in part by correctly assessed insurance premia, is costly, a cost in part of our not having addressed climate change years ago.
But risk of loss is determined by more than location and weather. Other investment -- hardening of assets and better forest management such as controlled burning -- also have net benefits. [See: https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/climate-risk-and-insurance]
Adaption to past emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere whether fires, or floods, sea-level rise or crop yield changes, although costly, is less costly than suffering repeated losses.[1]
2. The weather conditions that produced the fire is an additional data point in global geophysical models linking CO2 emissions with extreme weather events which in turn feeds into economic models estimating the benefits of emitting less, eventually zero, eventually less than zero CO2 into the atmosphere.
3. The benefits of lower net emissions determine how much cost we should be willing to bear today and into the to future to obtain those benefits. The least costly way of obtaining those benefits is for every person deciding to oxidize a carbon atom and release it into the atmosphere to absorb the cost of emitting that molecule. The benefits can be obtained by some people bearing higher costs and others none, but the total costs of obtaining the same benefits that way is higher, so giving every decisionmaker the same incentive is more desirable.
4. The most direct way to create equal, least-cost incentives not to emit oxidized carbon atoms into the atmosphere is for each nation to levy an excise tax on the sale of carbon-containing fuels in proportion to the CO2 that will be emitted when the fuel is used and offer an equivalent subsidy for the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere: a tax on net emissions of CO2.
5. Environmentalists should be working in diverse ways to promote adoption of tax on net emissions of CO2. Until such a tax is adopted, they should advocate for other taxes, subsidies and regulations that mimic as well as possible the effects of the tax and eschew policies that poorly mimic the effects. https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/why-not-lng-export
Image prompt: Firefighter looking helplessly at a forest fire threatening a group of homes.
[Standard bleg: Although my style is know-it-all-ism, I do sometime entertain the thought that, here and there, I might be mistaken on some minor detail. I would welcome comments on these views.]
[1] For purposes of investment decisions made today it is not necessary to know how much of the losses being reduced by the investment is the result of CO2 accumulation since whenever so long as the risk model is based on all the data. https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/weather-event-attribution