The L.A. Fires Are a Natural Disaster, Not a Policy Disaster
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.
This week’s newsletter takes an extended look at the Los Angeles–area fires and the alleged link between bad zoning, land use, insurance, and environmental review policies and the damage done by the fires themselves.
The Los Angeles Fires and the Overblown Role of Public Policy
California, of course, has many bad public policies. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a bad California policy. Swinging the cat probably violates a couple of them.
With the outbreak of deadly fires in the Los Angeles area, a number of journalists and wonks are drawing links between many of these bad policies and the unprecedented destruction resulting from the blaze.
State and federal environmental review laws add years of delay to needed controlled burns and fuels reduction activity on public lands. California’s zoning laws have pushed more people into the urban periphery where they’re more exposed to wildfire risk. California’s suppression of home insurance premiums has done the same by masking the cost of living in wildfire-prone areas.
These criticisms are all leveled at bad policies this newsletter has repeatedly covered.
In some contexts, those policies do make the damage done by wildfires worse. They’ll certainly complicate Los Angeles’ recovery efforts.
But the connection between bad land use, insurance, and environmental regulations and the damage done by the current Los Angeles fires to people and property is more tenuous.
On closer inspection, this appears to be a severe natural disaster with natural causes. Bad public policy has played only a marginal role.
Reviewing the Role of Environmental Review
The hilly shrubland where the Palisades and Eaton fires started, and are still burning, are a mesh of federal, state, and locally owned parks, nature preserves, and undeveloped open space.
A lot of commentary has naturally focused on how federal and state environmental review laws prevent state and federal agencies from doing fuels reduction activity that would reduce wildfire risk on these lands.
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and its state-level equivalent, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), both require agencies to produce book-length reports before performing controlled burns or mechanically thinning vegetation.
Producing those book reports takes years. Environmental lawsuits alleging insufficiently long book reports can add additional years to the process.
According to research by the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), NEPA reviews for mechanical thinning (where flammable vegetation is cleared away) can take over five years. Reviews of prescribed burns can take over seven. Litigation can add another year or two to the process.
This lengthy environmental review process makes good forest management much more difficult. There’s not a lot of evidence that it’s contributed to the severity of the Los Angeles fires.
That’s because the chaparral and shrub–covered hillsides currently burning are not areas where controlled burns would typically be done, says Luca Carmignani, an assistant professor and wildfire researcher at San Diego University.
“Controlled burns” in those environments are hard to control. Period.
Fires in shrubland areas “tend to be high-intensity fires where the entire plant burns. It’s a little less controllable than fire on the ground of a forest floor. That tends to be much, much lower intensity,” he tells Reason. “Controlled burns are done in some cases, but it’s mostly for areas covered by grass or areas not really applicable to Los Angeles.”
Mechanical thinning is a more useful fuels reduction method in the Los Angeles areas, says Carmignani. It’s also an area where a lot of mechanical thinning already happens.
The Santa Monica Mountains, where the Palisades fire is still burning, has been the site of a lot of mechanical thinning activity. Journalist Kevin Drum notes that fuel reduction activity happened on over half a million acres in California last year.
More likely could have been done without NEPA and CEQA in the way.
Even so, there’s also only so much fuels reduction can do to reduce wildfire risk in the conditions that led to Los Angeles’ current fires: exceptionally strong seasonal Santa Ana winds that reached hurricane levels of intensity.
“If you have strong winds, embers fly away miles ahead of the fire,” says Carmignani. Clearing a few hundred yards here or there can provide firefighters with areas to operate. But it isn’t going to stop the fire from spreading to new areas when winds are that high.
If the four-lane Pacific Coast Highway wasn’t enough of a fire break to p
Article from Reason.com
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