Bingo! CA reaps the insanity that it sows. I'd like to think they will learn someday, but that's a pipedream. I don't blame State Farm for saying sayonara!
I don't blame State Farm nor any other business wanting to flee California because of its overregulation that's seen few, if any, good results. Objectively good results; not the subjective opinions of those who are trying to implement that regulation.
The insanity of which you speak started in 1988, when a ballot measure called proposition 103 passed with 51% of the vote. This is what prevents the insurance commissioner from allowing rates to rise. George Deukmejian, the republican governor of CA at the time, claimed he was “neutral” on the law. The CA supreme court, of which no fewer than 6 justices were appointed by Deukmejian himself, upheld most of the law when challenged in court in 1989.
So I guess the lesson we should learn is that CA state residents in 1988, including many republicans, along with the republican governor and 6 republican-appointed CA supreme court justices were woefully and horribly wrong in thinking that there would be any repercussions for capping insurance rates. We have them to thank for these problems. Short of repealing prop 103, there is very little any insurance commissioner appointed by the governor can do.
Funny that you didn't mention that the regulations that don't allow rates to rise was passed 37 years ago, in 1988 by a ballot measure called proposition 103. In 1989 the state supreme court, of which 6 justices were appointed by republican Governor George Deukmejian, upheld the law. For over 30 years insurers seemed to be perfectly willing to do business in the state, even in the presence of prop 103. Can you think of anything that has happened in the state in the last decade that might have caused this sudden change of heart? Maybe the Camp fire that leveled the town of Paradise in 2018? Or maybe the Dixie and Caldor fires in 2021 that ravaged the Sierra Nevada, almost making their way to Tahoe, or the Tubbs fire in 2017 that destroyed parts of Napa and Sonoma, or the LNU and CZU lightning complex fires in 2020, or the Thomas and Woolsey fires in Ventura county in 2017 and 2018. Nahh, it can't have anything to do with policy decisions with broad bipartisan support made 40 years ago that drastically underestimated the risks we'd be facing today.
Also, where are you getting your data on Colorado fires? The Marshall fire in 2021 is the most destructive in state history and did upwards of $2B in damage. Why are you citing numbers from 2012?
Fascinating bit about the “lost” 15 million acres of public land. Would love to see a map of where it all is.
California used to do controlled burns and forest management. Thank the Sierra Club and a gazillion other environmental groups for screwing it all up. We don’t clear the forest floors so then the whole thing burns. We have to save a stupid fish so our idiot Governor Hair Hitler releases millions of gallons of precious rainwater to the ocean and the Delta Smelt fish dies off anyway. Monkeys could run my state better.
One of our national problems is federal land ownership. The Founders never envisioned or even imagined having the federal government own the land. In the 13 Colonies there was very little crown land because there was little crown land in England. The king did not own the land. When the government took possession of the Northwest Territories (Indian territory under the British) it sold the land off through land offices as fast as it could. But when the US seized northern Mexico, the federal government inherited the Spanish land management system under which the Crowned owned all of the land not yet granted to others. And instead of continuing the original policy of selling it off (or handing it to the states), Congress decided to keep it. This was wrong, stupid, unconstitutional and a public policy disaster. It's the reason that Mexican land use policy has been such a disaster. It's insane that the US government should own one-third of the land in the West. That land should belong to the states or be sold off. This has not happened because of the unimaginable amount of corruption that lives off of federal land.
California wouldn’t allow the insurance companies to increase rates, so they canceled their policies. Pretty simple, no reason to bring up the climate hoax.
Well apparently the relationship between the California politicians and PG and E and the whole global warming con / grift is all that matters not keeping their constituents safe or even providing basic services like police and firefighters
Timely: Parts of North Carolina, still recovering from Helene, are now evacuating in front of fire: National Forests where maintenance was not done for twenty years now have millions of tons of drying deadfall. Areas hit by floods are now subject to fires, but attention is still put on California.
Yep - and Sam Harris' piece asking that private citizens give a portion of their money to LA, so the municipal/state governments can throw it away again, was disgraceful. There is already copious money in CA from state income tax alone. As we argue in our latest piece ( https://thewholetruthpublications.substack.com/p/the-fire-and-the-plague?r=4dg1kb ) the times are surely-a-changin' in Los Angeles.
“Mike Davis | Ecology of Fear | Metropolitan Books | September 1998
The Case for Letting Malibu Burn
Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
(Extract)
“Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”
A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
“Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.”
Another article:
“Reason Magazine
California's Fire
Catastrophe Is Largely a
Result of Bad
Government Policies
This year's deadly wildfires were predicted and unnecessary.
J.D. TUCCILLE | 1.13.2025”
(Extract)
"Proactive measures like thinning and prescribed burns can significantly reduce wildfire risks, but such projects are often tied up for years in environmental reviews or lawsuits," Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), told me by email. "In places like California, these delays have had devastating consequences, with restoration work stalled while communities and ecosystems burn to the ground. Addressing the wildfire crisis will require bold policy changes to streamline reviews, cut red tape, and ensure these projects can move forward before it's too late."
For example, as I've written before, under the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), members of the public and activist groups can formally object to proposed actions, such as forest thinning, through a bureaucratic process that slows matters to a crawl. If that doesn't deliver results, they move their challenges to the courts and litigate them into submission. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) creates additional red-tape hurdles at the state level, imposing years of delays.
Regan and his colleagues at PERC have frequently addressed this subject-presciently, you might say, except that everybody except California government officials saw this moment coming.
California has failed to effectively manage its forests. "Decades of fire suppression, coupled with a hands-off approach to forest management, have created dangerous fuel loads (the amount of combustible material in a particular area," Regan wrote. Ominously, he added: "With conditions like this, all it takes to ignite an inferno is a spark and some wind."
In 2020, Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica also named California's forest management as a serious concern.
"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California," Weil noted. "Between 1982 and 1998, California's agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres." She emphasized that "California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine — to destabilize in terms of fire.
In 2021, Holly Fretwell and Jonathan Wood of PERC published Fix America's Forests: Reforms to Restore National Forests, recommending means to address wildfire risks in California and across the country. To claims that the wildfire problem is overwhelmingly one of climate change, they respond that a "study led by Forest Service scientists estimated that of four factors driving fire severity in the western United States, live fuel 'was the most important,' accounting for 53 percent of average relative influence, while climate accounted for 14 percent." Climate matters, but other policy choices matter more.
Fretwell and Wood recommend restricting the scope of regulatory reviews that stands in the way of forest restoration, requiring that lawsuits against restoration projects be filed quickly, and excluding prescribed burns from carbon emissions calculations that can stand in the way of such projects.
"There is broad agreement on the need for better forest management, but outdated policies and regulatory hurdles continue to delay critical restoration efforts," Regan told me.
If government officials finally take these hard-learned lessons to heart and ease the process of providing and storing water, restoring forests, and fighting fires, Californians might be spared from future disasters. They seem poised to work with the incoming Trump administration on exactly that. But reforms will come too late for those who have already lost lives, homes, and businesses.”
A final article:
This is an extract from a January 10, 2025 National Review article by Ryan Mills that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
I do NOT blame them! Criminals run amok, robbing businesses and cars and police aren’t allowed to do their jobs and prosecuting attorneys just go after the good guys- Not fair to the states that don’t put up with that. Insurance companies stay there- WE will end up paying for California’s stupidity and gross negligence.
Everyone is calling Trump a fascist (which he is), but the reality is that California is already even more fascistic than he is. I’m a licensed architect and I also left California and stopped working in California because of their insanely controlling government, which ENCOURAGES people to build combustible wood frame houses in their poorly managed forests. This is self-destructive lunacy at it’s finest… https://substack.com/home/post/p-154512006
Exactly. Cali’s proscriptions against controlled burns and brush removal amount to storing barrels of gasoline next to all the houses. As an individual homeowner, you could expect to have your rates raised or your insurance cancelled if you did stupid things like that. Cali didn’t let them raise rates, so State Farm chose the only other open alternative.
Bingo! CA reaps the insanity that it sows. I'd like to think they will learn someday, but that's a pipedream. I don't blame State Farm for saying sayonara!
I don't blame State Farm nor any other business wanting to flee California because of its overregulation that's seen few, if any, good results. Objectively good results; not the subjective opinions of those who are trying to implement that regulation.
The insanity of which you speak started in 1988, when a ballot measure called proposition 103 passed with 51% of the vote. This is what prevents the insurance commissioner from allowing rates to rise. George Deukmejian, the republican governor of CA at the time, claimed he was “neutral” on the law. The CA supreme court, of which no fewer than 6 justices were appointed by Deukmejian himself, upheld most of the law when challenged in court in 1989.
So I guess the lesson we should learn is that CA state residents in 1988, including many republicans, along with the republican governor and 6 republican-appointed CA supreme court justices were woefully and horribly wrong in thinking that there would be any repercussions for capping insurance rates. We have them to thank for these problems. Short of repealing prop 103, there is very little any insurance commissioner appointed by the governor can do.
Point well taken. Both California and the nations problems could not have occurred without bipartisan participation. That is indeed true.
Excellent article. Truthful!
Thanks!
Funny that you didn't mention that the regulations that don't allow rates to rise was passed 37 years ago, in 1988 by a ballot measure called proposition 103. In 1989 the state supreme court, of which 6 justices were appointed by republican Governor George Deukmejian, upheld the law. For over 30 years insurers seemed to be perfectly willing to do business in the state, even in the presence of prop 103. Can you think of anything that has happened in the state in the last decade that might have caused this sudden change of heart? Maybe the Camp fire that leveled the town of Paradise in 2018? Or maybe the Dixie and Caldor fires in 2021 that ravaged the Sierra Nevada, almost making their way to Tahoe, or the Tubbs fire in 2017 that destroyed parts of Napa and Sonoma, or the LNU and CZU lightning complex fires in 2020, or the Thomas and Woolsey fires in Ventura county in 2017 and 2018. Nahh, it can't have anything to do with policy decisions with broad bipartisan support made 40 years ago that drastically underestimated the risks we'd be facing today.
Also, where are you getting your data on Colorado fires? The Marshall fire in 2021 is the most destructive in state history and did upwards of $2B in damage. Why are you citing numbers from 2012?
Fascinating bit about the “lost” 15 million acres of public land. Would love to see a map of where it all is.
California used to do controlled burns and forest management. Thank the Sierra Club and a gazillion other environmental groups for screwing it all up. We don’t clear the forest floors so then the whole thing burns. We have to save a stupid fish so our idiot Governor Hair Hitler releases millions of gallons of precious rainwater to the ocean and the Delta Smelt fish dies off anyway. Monkeys could run my state better.
One of our national problems is federal land ownership. The Founders never envisioned or even imagined having the federal government own the land. In the 13 Colonies there was very little crown land because there was little crown land in England. The king did not own the land. When the government took possession of the Northwest Territories (Indian territory under the British) it sold the land off through land offices as fast as it could. But when the US seized northern Mexico, the federal government inherited the Spanish land management system under which the Crowned owned all of the land not yet granted to others. And instead of continuing the original policy of selling it off (or handing it to the states), Congress decided to keep it. This was wrong, stupid, unconstitutional and a public policy disaster. It's the reason that Mexican land use policy has been such a disaster. It's insane that the US government should own one-third of the land in the West. That land should belong to the states or be sold off. This has not happened because of the unimaginable amount of corruption that lives off of federal land.
California wouldn’t allow the insurance companies to increase rates, so they canceled their policies. Pretty simple, no reason to bring up the climate hoax.
Climate change is BS.
https://youtu.be/5KnZ_CvGWMU?si=25AFGnkGRYiLp5dr
Well apparently the relationship between the California politicians and PG and E and the whole global warming con / grift is all that matters not keeping their constituents safe or even providing basic services like police and firefighters
Such incompetence.
By voters, the public and media.
Just like Hawaii.
You’re being burned out as squatters. Yes, you.
Timely: Parts of North Carolina, still recovering from Helene, are now evacuating in front of fire: National Forests where maintenance was not done for twenty years now have millions of tons of drying deadfall. Areas hit by floods are now subject to fires, but attention is still put on California.
Yep - and Sam Harris' piece asking that private citizens give a portion of their money to LA, so the municipal/state governments can throw it away again, was disgraceful. There is already copious money in CA from state income tax alone. As we argue in our latest piece ( https://thewholetruthpublications.substack.com/p/the-fire-and-the-plague?r=4dg1kb ) the times are surely-a-changin' in Los Angeles.
The insurance companies tried to correct some this years ago Recently insurance companies decided that the risk was too high
A few articles about wildfire and its causes:
“Mike Davis | Ecology of Fear | Metropolitan Books | September 1998
The Case for Letting Malibu Burn
Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
(Extract)
“Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”
A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
“Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.”
Another article:
“Reason Magazine
California's Fire
Catastrophe Is Largely a
Result of Bad
Government Policies
This year's deadly wildfires were predicted and unnecessary.
J.D. TUCCILLE | 1.13.2025”
(Extract)
"Proactive measures like thinning and prescribed burns can significantly reduce wildfire risks, but such projects are often tied up for years in environmental reviews or lawsuits," Shawn Regan, vice president of research at the Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), told me by email. "In places like California, these delays have had devastating consequences, with restoration work stalled while communities and ecosystems burn to the ground. Addressing the wildfire crisis will require bold policy changes to streamline reviews, cut red tape, and ensure these projects can move forward before it's too late."
For example, as I've written before, under the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), members of the public and activist groups can formally object to proposed actions, such as forest thinning, through a bureaucratic process that slows matters to a crawl. If that doesn't deliver results, they move their challenges to the courts and litigate them into submission. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) creates additional red-tape hurdles at the state level, imposing years of delays.
Regan and his colleagues at PERC have frequently addressed this subject-presciently, you might say, except that everybody except California government officials saw this moment coming.
California has failed to effectively manage its forests. "Decades of fire suppression, coupled with a hands-off approach to forest management, have created dangerous fuel loads (the amount of combustible material in a particular area," Regan wrote. Ominously, he added: "With conditions like this, all it takes to ignite an inferno is a spark and some wind."
In 2020, Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica also named California's forest management as a serious concern.
"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California," Weil noted. "Between 1982 and 1998, California's agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres." She emphasized that "California would need to burn 20 million acres—an area about the size of Maine — to destabilize in terms of fire.
In 2021, Holly Fretwell and Jonathan Wood of PERC published Fix America's Forests: Reforms to Restore National Forests, recommending means to address wildfire risks in California and across the country. To claims that the wildfire problem is overwhelmingly one of climate change, they respond that a "study led by Forest Service scientists estimated that of four factors driving fire severity in the western United States, live fuel 'was the most important,' accounting for 53 percent of average relative influence, while climate accounted for 14 percent." Climate matters, but other policy choices matter more.
Fretwell and Wood recommend restricting the scope of regulatory reviews that stands in the way of forest restoration, requiring that lawsuits against restoration projects be filed quickly, and excluding prescribed burns from carbon emissions calculations that can stand in the way of such projects.
"There is broad agreement on the need for better forest management, but outdated policies and regulatory hurdles continue to delay critical restoration efforts," Regan told me.
If government officials finally take these hard-learned lessons to heart and ease the process of providing and storing water, restoring forests, and fighting fires, Californians might be spared from future disasters. They seem poised to work with the incoming Trump administration on exactly that. But reforms will come too late for those who have already lost lives, homes, and businesses.”
A final article:
This is an extract from a January 10, 2025 National Review article by Ryan Mills that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
Why does South Carolina not have similar wildfire issues?🤔
I do NOT blame them! Criminals run amok, robbing businesses and cars and police aren’t allowed to do their jobs and prosecuting attorneys just go after the good guys- Not fair to the states that don’t put up with that. Insurance companies stay there- WE will end up paying for California’s stupidity and gross negligence.
Everyone is calling Trump a fascist (which he is), but the reality is that California is already even more fascistic than he is. I’m a licensed architect and I also left California and stopped working in California because of their insanely controlling government, which ENCOURAGES people to build combustible wood frame houses in their poorly managed forests. This is self-destructive lunacy at it’s finest… https://substack.com/home/post/p-154512006
Exactly. Cali’s proscriptions against controlled burns and brush removal amount to storing barrels of gasoline next to all the houses. As an individual homeowner, you could expect to have your rates raised or your insurance cancelled if you did stupid things like that. Cali didn’t let them raise rates, so State Farm chose the only other open alternative.