As soon as wildfires roared into wealthy Los Angeles neighborhoods, politicians, activists, and journalists began framing the disaster as “the climate crisis in action,” in the words of one global NGO. The leftist Zinn Education Project urged teachers to “#TeachClimateJustice” by encouraging students to describe the event as “a fossil-fueled disaster.” It’s true that climate change is one of several plausible factors behind this historic outbreak (though, as Patrick Brown notes, the role of warming is nuanced). But the relentless emphasis on climate obscures a bigger lesson from the ongoing fire catastrophe: Los Angeles just became the world’s most dramatic example of the expanding bullseye effect. That’s the term researchers use to help explain the ever-rising financial costs imposed by hurricanes, fires, and other natural disasters. When people build expensive infrastructure in areas prone to such misfortunes, the cost of extreme events increases over time, even if their frequency or intensity remains unchanged.
Fires have been ripping through the forests and scrublands of California for millennia. Indeed, with its combination of long dry seasons and intense Santa Ana winds, the state is uniquely prone to fire. “It’s a place that nature built to burn, often explosively,” writes the noted historian of wildfires, Stephen J. Pyne. In sparsely populated or empty areas, fires cost little in terms of treasure or lives (in fact, they can be beneficial to some ecosystems). But when a wildfire encroaches upon neighborhoods abutting wild terrain—a zone known as the wildland-urban interface (WUI)—the destruction can be swift and catastrophic. The Camp Fire, which raced through the Sierra foothill community of Paradise in 2018, killed 85 people and wiped out some 18,000 structures.
It’s too soon to predict the human cost of the Los Angeles fires; 24 deaths have been recorded as of Monday, according to the L.A. County Medical Examiner’s office. But it is clear that the economic toll will be immense. The Santa Ana winds blew from a more northerly direction than usual as the blazes kicked off last week, pushing multiple fires down the scrub-covered slopes of the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains, directly into some of the country’s most affluent suburban neighborhoods, including Pacific Palisades and the Hollywood Hills. More than 40,000 acres have burned so far. The fires remain only partially contained, new blazes continued to pop up, and looters have targeted evacuated neighborhoods. “L.A. was not prepared for something everyone knew would happen,” a friend in the area emailed me.
Many observers compare the crisis with Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Like that calamity, the L.A. fires are bound to capture national attention for months, and remediation efforts will likely soak up massive federal resources. In the burnt-over districts, the housing stock has been totally destroyed, and vital infrastructure, including the power grid, will need to be rebuilt from scratch. As after Katrina, the disaster will provoke a national conversation about what federal, state, and local policies conspired to put so many people at risk. While the media stresses climate change, conservative critics point to DEI policies in L.A. government, budget cuts to the fire department, the failure to improve water infrastructure, poor forest-management practices, and other lapses in political leadership.
Those issues all demand investigation. But the biggest question facing California is why so many of its residents live in such hazardous terrain. As I reported in a 2023 City Journal special issue on California, more than a quarter of the state’s residents—roughly 11.2 million people—live in fire-prone WUI regions. Some are drawn there by the state’s natural beauty, but many homebuyers are pushed out of urban areas by regulations that restrict housing construction and thus drive up costs. In recent decades, half of California’s new homes have been built in non-urban regions. That includes more remote communities such as Paradise, where—unlike in elite L.A. suburbs—many homes are relatively affordable. Either way, the explosion in WUI construction has dramatically expanded the scale of economic losses—the disaster “bullseye”—when wildfires ravage those areas.
Nonetheless, California continues to nudge its citizens out of dense regions (which are relatively safe from fire) and into more vulnerable terrain. In fact, while urban dwellers face sky-high costs and declining services, residents of the WUI often benefit from hidden subsidies. For example, while living in fire country entails higher risks, California funds a massive firefighting program focused mostly on protecting residents and their homes. These efforts are not always successful, of course, but the state’s firefighters usually succeed in keeping fires from reaching developed areas. Knowledge that homes in the WUI are likely to be protected (at no cost to the homeowner) constitutes a huge, if hidden, subsidy. Two economists who studied this phenomenon concluded that the state’s firefighting investment boosts WUI home values and effectively bankrolls “development in harm’s way.”
L.A.’s damaged and threatened neighborhoods are an outlier in this dynamic. Some were developed as much as a century ago, long before economic factors lured other Californians into WUI regions. Residents of these peaceful, long-settled communities might easily forget they live next to wild land. Nonetheless, the city’s development patterns subtly amplify fire risks for those on the city margins. Decades of lush landscaping have put more fuel in the paths of fires. (The non-native palm trees beloved by Angelenos light up like roman candles when ignited, showering burning embers on everything downwind.) And the existence of so much wooden infrastructure creates another hazard, note fire researchers Faith Kearns and Max Moritz: when wildfires reach settled areas, they write, “wind driven home-to-home fire spread then occurs, causing risky ‘urban conflagrations’ that can be almost impossible to stop.”
Most wildland fires are started, one way or another, by humans. Potential sources of the L.A. blazes include fires started in homeless encampments, arson, and the smoldering remnants of New Year’s Eve fireworks. Since a bigger human population raises the risk of fires, WUI areas can be more vulnerable than pure back country. That means built-up WUI communities face both more frequent fires and more intense fires, due to their concentrations of flammable infrastructure. Both factors multiply the bullseye effect. L.A.’s massive runup in home prices in recent years has inflated the bullseye even more. Early estimates for the total cost of the disaster run as high as $275 billion.
Even California’s huge investment in wildland fire suppression can’t stop every fire from reaching built-up areas. And those risks are reflected in rapidly climbing insurance rates for WUI residents. But here, too, the state tries to shield homeowners from the full costs of their choices. For decades, the state has leaned on insurers to limit rate increases in higher-risk areas. Believing they are being asked to sell policies that don’t reflect actual fire risks, some insurers have refused to take on new customers or renew policies in vulnerable regions. In recent years, the state has ordered “moratoriums”—long periods in which insurers are not allowed to cancel policies. On Friday, California insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara announced a one-year moratorium on policy non-renewals or cancellations in areas surrounding the wildfires. The humanitarian impulse behind such moves is obvious, but the ultimate effect of these policies is to subsidize insurance costs, and thus to encourage homebuilding, in more dangerous WUI areas. Unless California reforms its anti-market insurance regulations, insurers will eventually either collapse or exit the state. That would leave the unsustainable insurance burden on taxpayers’ shoulders.
No one should have been surprised when fires descended on L.A.’s elite hillside neighborhoods. Fires have always threatened these slopes. For example, in 1961, a wind-driven fire tore through the tony Bel Air and Brentwood neighborhoods, destroying nearly 500 houses, including those of Burt Lancaster and Zsa Zsa Gabor. The movie-star enclave of Malibu burns almost routinely. But California didn’t heed the lessons of Los Angeles, and the WUI building boom continued, creating expanding disaster bullseyes across the state. The enormous costs and high death tolls of California’s 2018 and 2020 fire seasons should have spurred officials to reconsider the state’s perverse housing incentives and other policies that worsen fire risks. Instead, politicians, activists, and the media used those clusters of disasters as arguments for more aggressive policies against climate change. Whatever one thinks of the urgency of that issue, the emphasis on climate over more proximate causes proved a massive blunder.
Even if California’s climate policies were to succeed in dramatically lowering carbon emissions, it would take many decades—not to mention a similarly robust shift by China, the world’s top emitter—before such actions made a dent in predicted temperature increases. Meantime, California has neglected more achievable policies that could reduce fire risks in the near term: controlled burns and other changes in forestry practices, providing wildland-adjacent city fire departments with adequate resources, and keeping first responders focused on, well, firefighting as opposed to progressive social goals. (The skin tone or sexual orientation of firefighters is probably not the top concern of a family whose house is on fire.)
Policymakers also need to unwind the perverse incentives that promote high-risk development in WUI regions. At the very least, Californians who do not reside in scenic fire zones shouldn’t be forced to subsidize those who do. That said, people will continue to live in the state’s beautiful wild areas, and they need protection, too. After Hurricane Andrew destroyed 125,000 Florida homes in 1992, the state overhauled its building codes to require tougher construction. Those rules have saved homes and lives ever since. California needs to get equally serious about protecting its residents and infrastructure from wildfires. That includes requiring safer building materials, as well as making zoning and landscaping changes that create “defensible space” around structures.
It’s possible to make the case for lowering emissions without exaggerating tenuous links between climate and individual events such as wildfires. But when activists frame every weather-related disaster as an argument for their favored climate solutions, they encourage a “learned helplessness” in citizens and policymakers. When we’re taught to see every wildfire or hurricane as the result of vast forces beyond our control, we neglect the actions that might mitigate the damage from those events. For homeowners, those actions can be as simple as removing flammable plants from one’s yard.
For politicians, climate is too often used as an excuse for their own poor planning or lack of interest in the details of providing basic services to taxpayers. California governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass have both made the fight against climate change a core priority of their administrations. Meantime, back in 2014, California voters passed a $7.5 billion bond to build water infrastructure projects, including new reservoirs. Yet, as of this year, no major projects have broken ground. Even as she worked to electrify city buses and “increase equity in L.A.’s transition to clean energy,” Mayor Bass was slashing the fire department’s budget; when the fires struck, L.A.’s fire departments were understaffed and overwhelmed. Additionally, a key reservoir supplying Pacific Palisades was left empty; the region’s fire hydrants soon ran dry. While the state’s leaders focused on the fashionable, long-range issue of climate change, they neglected the mundane, here-and-now policies that could have kept Californians safer.
Photo by Nick Ut/Getty Images