What happened in LA last month? On that, basically everyone agrees: devastating wildfires that killed at least 29 people and cost at least $100 billion in property damage.
But why did those fires burn so intensely for so long? Here, you start to get a multiplicity of opinions. Was it climate change? Poor land management? Bureaucratic obstacles to fire mitigation? A lack of water in critical reservoirs? Slashed funding to fire departments, or missing local politicians, or any of the other potential factors?
I had my view in the days after the fire broke out: bad land management, mostly caused by a lack of state capacity —specifically permitting issues — against a backdrop of climate change leading to hotter and drier conditions, maybe with a sprinkling of political mismanagement thrown in. But I don’t follow fires closely. So to get a better handle on the question, I got ahold of a guy named Matt Weiner.
Weiner is the CEO and founder of Megafire Action: it's an advocacy group that thinks the megafire crisis is solvable. We talked about a lot here, from California's topography, to the state insurance market, to the difference between good fire and bad fire. We argued a bit about funding, as you'll see, but we shared some deep agreement about the bureaucratic reasons it's hard to do fire mitigation.
Weiner grew up in LA. He's spent a lot of time working on the politics of wildfire management, as the executive director of the California Democratic Congressional Delegation. So he advised 46 members of Congress, all Democrats from California, on all kinds of California specific policy matters, including wildfire.
One last note: after this interview was recorded, Senators Tim Sheehy (R-MT) and Alex Padilla (D-CA) introduced a bill to create a new unified federal wildfire force within the Interior Department. It’s something Megafire Action has advocated for.
We discuss:
California knows it has a fire problem. Why can’t it control it?
Where does mechanical thinning work, and where doesn’t it?
What tools from the Department of Defense should we be using in firefighting?
Do we need more money to fight fires?
Why do the country’s biggest environmental groups oppose fire mitigation?
Thanks to my colleague Beez for her judicious transcript edits.
You're from Los Angeles. How have the fires affected you?
We're okay, thankfully. I grew up in Topanga Canyon, with deep familiarity with fire. I was actually in DC meeting with some senators about wildfire policy when the fires broke out, and I flew home to help my parents evacuate. Fortunately, they know the drill by now. They just leave as soon as they see something burning towards Topanga Canyon.
I'm assuming that you got into fire policy in part because you grew up around this stuff?
I did. I have early memories of packing up and leaving during the '93 Malibu fires that burned through Topanga. Fast forward to 2018, I was the chief of staff to a state senator who represented the area that was burned by the Woolsey Fire. That fire burned through the Santa Monica mountains in a way we'd never seen before. I saw how all the systems that we built to deal with fire were being completely overwhelmed, even in a place that is particularly prepared for it. That made me much more focused on fire from a policy lens.
Can you break down the different organizations involved in firefighting in Southern California? Who are the players?
There are many. When we look at Los Angeles itself, you've got the Los Angeles Fire Department, you've got the LA County Fire Department. You have Cal Fire, which is the state fire department, and is probably the best wildland firefighting force in the world. And then you've got other national players like the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and others who have a role to play in managing fire on their lands.
Tell me more about Cal Fire. My understanding is they’re trained on wildfires to a degree that municipal fire departments are not.
Yes. Cal Fire is a robust, almost military-like wildfire fighting force. They’re also responsible for a lot of the mitigation work that happens on state lands in California. They have deep expertise on landscape management and forestry as well, but what they're mostly known for is being the best when it comes to suppression.
Is that model of a state fire organization common in other Western states?
It is, but no one has the resources that Cal Fire has, both just because of the resources in California and the unique risk that we face in our wildland urban interface.
So Cal Fire does a lot of landscape management. Who else does?
The California Natural Resources Agency does. In a lot of cases, individual counties are responsible for work on their lands. You'll also get indigenous tribes, private landowners, and nonprofits that work on different landscapes. And then water agencies have to mitigate risk in their watersheds.
At a high level, how should we understand the LA fires of the last few weeks?
When we talk about wildfire, we largely talk about two types of fire. There are these large, landscape-driven fires that we tend to see up north in California and elsewhere in the West, but also in parts of Southern California as well.
Then there's these other fires, these wildland urban interface fires that usually start in the wildland. But once they get to structures, it's a structure-to-structure fire. That distinction causes different problems and requires different solution sets. The fires in Los Angeles look more like an urban conflagration or a structure-to-structure fire than a traditional wildland fire.
We knew places like the Palisades and Altadena were at very high risk for a long time, but even then, it's really hard to fathom the scale of destruction. I've walked through countless fire zones over the years, and I've never seen anything like what I saw when I walked through those areas.
In terms of the scale, or…
The scale of destruction. You can know the risk is there, right? But it's still hard to fathom what looks like a war zone. It feels like pictures I've seen of Grozny. And that structure-to-structure fire, once it's hot and in those conditions, it goes through everything in a way that doesn't make sense to a lot of people who study the built environment.
When I took my notes a week ago, the burned area was two and a half times the size of Manhattan. I believe it's more now.
And six of the seven most destructive fires in California in the last hundred years have happened since 2020.
I believe that's right. Also, the 20 largest fires in California history have all happened in the last 20 years.
What's that about? Explain that for me.
We're looking at climate change combined with years of mismanagement and poor community design creating a perfect storm here.
For a long time, we got really good at suppressing fires. We took fire out of landscapes that needed to thrive. And what we're seeing is climate change and years of fire exclusion in these areas have made it so that we're pushing the bounds of what we're capable of suppressing here. It's overwhelming all of our systems.
We had good fire on the land before Westerners essentially came here and took it out, right? Indigenous tribes have known how to manage these landscapes for millennia. We made a conscious decision over the last 150-plus years to take that fire out.
While that has been changing, there are challenges to us doing it. Those challenges are workforce related, they're regulatory, and also the fact that we built in places where it's hard to get good fire on the ground now in certain areas. It's hard for us to do what we need to do from a landscape level.
Explain what you mean by “hard” here. Is it hard on a mechanical level?
Yes. Once you've taken fire out of an ecosystem, it's really hard to restore it without going in and doing a lot of physical labor to get the land ready for it. By taking good fire out, you've left overly dense forests. Then you combine that with drought and climate change, and you've got tinderboxes everywhere. You could not reintroduce good low-intensity fire there if you wanted to right now.
So you often have to do what's called mechanical thinning, which is going in and pulling out dead trees and other fuels, so that you can get the landscape ready for prescribed fire.
Now, mechanical thinning alone can actually do a lot to improve wildfire risk. If you do mechanical thinning and prescribed fire, you can reduce the intensity of fires on forested landscapes by 70%.
When you have mixed-intensity fires that are natural to this area, you get some areas where there's high-intensity fire, some where there's low-intensity fire, but you leave a mosaic across the landscape that allows the landscape to grow back to its natural balance. If catastrophic fire is too heavy in the mix there, then it's really hard for these landscapes to regrow to where they should be to be balanced, and it creates a feedback loop where they're more destructive from a wildfire standpoint.
What distinguishes a good fire from a bad fire?
A good fire is one that we would see as having resource, economic, and ecological benefit: something that will leave behind a landscape that is more resilient going forward. Usually what that'll look like is a fire that creeps along the bottom of a forest, and sometimes will take a tree down. If you look at footage of indigenous tribes doing prescribed fires, it's usually not as invasive as what you see with these catastrophic fires, where the fire is jumping from the crown of the tree to the crown of the next tree, and leaving hundreds of thousands of acres of essentially moonscape in some places.
If you go and look at some of the recent fires, like the Dixie Fire and the Caldor Fire, there are hundreds of thousands of acres in Northern California that may never grow back in the way we envision it.
In Southern California, what should the rate of good fires be?
It depends. Southern California is a different landscape. These chaparral landscapes are meant to burn, but not as frequently and as intensely. Managing them and using prescribed fire in these areas is very difficult. There are areas where it makes sense, but a lot of what we're talking about with these SoCal landscapes is creating “defensible space” around communities to try and prevent ignitions, and to try and give firefighters the chance to stop a fire from getting into a community.
When you distinguish between Northern and Southern California, Northern is generally more wooded, and Southern is more chaparral?
Yes — Southern is much more shrubbery. It's not tall timber. It's not tall trees that are meant to survive fire in the same way. You do see a mix of oak and other things in Southern California — I'm overgeneralizing here — but the problem set is just very different.
Say more about how landscape management differs in those environments?
When we look at chaparral, we're creating defensible space, creating fire breaks, creating fire roads that can serve as fire breaks and access points for firefighters, so that they can make a stand to prevent the fire from jumping from one area of a canyon to another.
That's usually what we're talking about. We're also talking about clearing brush and other vegetation from inhabited areas, or from roadsides where ignitions are very likely to start from a car crash.
Whereas in densely wooded environments you’d want to see a lot more mechanical thinning?
Correct. I mean, some of the mechanical thinning you would see in the South would just look different — It's actually creating those fire breaks. In the North, you're talking about actually removing a lot of biomass from these areas.
What do you see as the biggest impediment to better landscape management? Is it funding? Is it bureaucratic capacity? Is it what people actually want in their backyard?
I'd say the main impediment to better landscape management is resources, and then bureaucracy. When I say bureaucracy, that can include things like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which makes it very hard for us to get good fire on the ground. It can also include concerns about liability.
And by concerns about liability, you mean that I might want to do a controlled burn, but I’m liable if I lose control of that burn, right?
Exactly. We've seen those fights get really contentious in the Pacific Northwest and in far northern California, where private landowners will blame the Forest Service for destroying some of their timber stock. And it can get violent. There was a story of a Forest Service employee getting arrested for a prescribed fire in Oregon by the local sheriff. That was fortunately resolved, but it sent a real chill in the wildfire community.
Let me ask you about your point about funding. Cal Fire's budget has never been bigger.
Yeah.
So contextualize your point for me, given that reality.
Let me take a step back. I'll use the federal example, just because I think it's a little clearer. In this case, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act made a lot of key investments that were long overdue for hazardous fuel mitigation across landscapes.
It was about 10 times what we normally spend a year. It went from about $500 million a year at the federal level to $5 billion over the course of those two pieces of legislation. That's still about 10% of what you would need to fully fund the Forest Service's 10-year crisis strategy.
Help me understand why that is from your perspective — we’ve never spent 10x more than what we're spending today, right?
It’s easier to spend on emergency response and recovery than it is to spend on emergency mitigation efforts. Public health is another area where that's a stark example. That's always been the case, but now people at every level understand that we can't keep putting firefighters in this impossible position year after year. No amount of suppression funding is going to get us out of this crisis.
What would the right amount of funding be to do fire mitigation, in your view?
It would cost about $50 billion over 10 years to fund the wildfire crisis strategy at the current cost-per-acre. To be clear, I don't think we're going to get that at the federal level. The imperative here is for us to dramatically drive down the cost to do this. But it starts with investing in our workforce.
I'm not going to make you come up with the exact numbers, but let's say we did allocate $50 billion over 10 years. How would you break down that pie chart?
You need to invest in a federal workforce that can do this work year-round. In addition to just doing the suppression activities, you're investing in infrastructure in areas where you need to take forest waste off forested landscapes in particular. That's expensive. Eventually you also have to invest in bioeconomy, right? You have to invest in market-based solutions around this as well.
Market-based solutions, meaning that there's a productive use for that cleared material?
Yeah, let me paint a quick picture here. When you do a treatment project in a forested landscape, one of the things you'll do is you'll take down ladder fuels: you'll cut branches that are low-lying on trees. You'll rake the forest, to borrow terminology from President Trump. You'll take dead and invasive species and other vegetation, you'll put it in a pile. In a lot of cases, they’ll come through in winter and just burn that pile for no economic, environmental, or climate benefit. Finding a way to utilize that to both drive down costs and to help us get a benefit from that is a top priority. It's an incredibly wasteful process that needs to be changed if we're going to do these things better, cheaper, faster, and at scale.
I want to set aside this question of increased funding, because when I think about this stuff, my assumption is that we're going into a constrained fiscal environment — both because of a Republican trifecta and because of secular trends and interest rates — that there’s just less money available for all kinds of things.
I could not agree more, but if I could add one thought on that: I think there's bipartisan concern about the ability of federal agencies to absorb the kind of funding that would be necessary to tackle this problem anyway. A big part of this challenge is going to be building capacity in these agencies and helping restore faith that they can spend it effectively.
When I was on the Hill at one point, we were pushing for $14 billion in hazardous fuel mitigation funding. That later went down to $2 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act. With the benefit of hindsight, it is hard for me to see how the Forest Service and other agencies could have spent that money effectively had we given it to them. That's a real problem.
I think people will be interested in hearing that from you. You've worked in Democratic politics your whole life. It's not necessarily the norm for people like you to say, “Federal agencies would not have been good at spending money if we gave it to them.”
On the one hand, it's understandable. If you've got a one-time major investment in agencies that have been underinvested in for a very long time, it is very hard for them to just turn the spigot on and spend that money effectively. I have a lot of sympathy for the people trying to do this work. In a lot of cases, they did very good work with this funding. With one-time money, it was very hard for them to make the long-term hires you need to make to implement these programs effectively
But longer-term, there is an issue here where these agencies are bifurcated. There are multiple agencies in different silos, managing different landscapes in very different ways. There's no one entity at the federal level that is responsible for our overall risk reduction goals as a country.
Can you explain to me, or give me a case study? What are two ways that agencies at the federal level do landscape management?
So a lot of it is through grants. For example, FEMA will spend a lot of money on community defense grants that will — at least theoretically — go out to communities to help them make these kinds of investments. You'll also see a lot of money going to partnerships like the National Forest Foundation, American Rivers, and others who do really tremendous work on the ground and know what they're doing.
It's also hard for them when they have an unpredictable funding source to be most effective, but I think those partnerships have been a real bright spot in the last couple years in getting good resilience projects on the ground.
But when you say that there's a lack of consistency in the federal approach, what do you mean by that? Is Partner A doing risk mitigation in one place very differently from Partner B in another location?
In some cases, yes. I also think you get a big difference between the agencies because they have different prerogatives. The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture. They are a commodity organization that also is pursuing stewardship, right? They have a very different focus than the National Park Service, whose priority is protecting a lot of their infrastructure. And that's very different from the way the states often view this as well.
Go a little bit deeper here on agency capacity. Let's say that you gave the Forest Service a long-term pile of money. What kinds of problems would the Forest Service run into in trying to use that money to do risk reduction?
They still would need to be able to build up the workforce to implement these kinds of projects, the ones who are doing it directly. I think fundamentally you also have an issue where a lot of the Forest Service salary and line items go to the planning side, and we don't have enough people in the field actually implementing these projects. That's a really big long-term issue. We need people on the ground who can do this work
One area we see this is permitting. Permitting takes an enormous amount of time. To get a project on the ground, the Forest Service has to dedicate months and months and countless staff hours not just to planning a project, but also to getting all the paperwork in line. Those hours could be much better spent actually implementing projects.
And if that permitting burden was reduced, more of the workforce of the US Forest Service could be actively working on mechanical thinning and “raking the forest?”
Yes, without question. Exactly. And putting good fire on the ground.
Pop quiz, because I happen to have this stat in front of me: Do you know what percentage of work on national forests the US Forest Service estimates is spent on planning and assessment?
I don't remember offhand.
It's 40%. 40% of Forest Service staff time on national forests is spent in planning, assessment, and permitting.
That does not surprise me at all.
In a place like California, where there's large amounts of funding relative to other states, and relatively effective institutions like Cal Fire, — how much of the policy problem is permitting? Leave aside increased risks of fire from climate change and other brute facts about the physical world, how much of the policy problem is the permitting piece?
When it comes to federal land, it's a huge problem. I don't think it can be overstated. Timelines are just simply too long, given the urgency of this crisis. There's two pieces to it: one, there's the staff hours that have to go into this. But there's also the fact that it takes years for an environmental impact statement to be put in place. Even a categorical exclusion, which is a streamlined way of getting the permitting done, can still take 180 days. And that's the most streamlined version we have.
To flesh out your point, I've got a list of four wildfires from my friend Thomas Hochman. The most famous is the Six Rivers National Forest Fire in 1999. In all four of these, the Forest Service was in the middle of doing multi-year environmental reviews to decide whether it could clear brush or do controlled burns.
And in each of these four cases, the Forest Service was still in the middle of its assessment when those forests burned down. So what's the point of the environmental review if it stops you from preventing the forest fire in the first place?
I think that's exactly right, especially when we're talking about catastrophic fire. We're in a place here where the West as we know it is not going to exist as we are used to seeing it. There needs to be real urgency about how we get these projects on the ground. There are a lot of different ways we can do that, but permitting is a really big piece of that puzzle.
When the Forest Service identifies high-risk forests that it thinks need controlled burns, it takes almost five years on average to get through environmental reviews. For complex projects it's closer to seven years.
One reason permitting takes so long is that we have an adversarial legal system. If you don’t do full environmental reviews, there are entities that will sue the Forest Service and will try to get an injunction in court for not doing sufficient environmental review.
A lot of these entities are environmental groups, and they’re run by people who care about the environment. I don't doubt that they do. So why is an organization like the Sierra Club trying to stop controlled burns?
I think there are two issues. One is philosophical, and one is historical. There are a lot of really good reasons, from a historical standpoint, to be mistrustful of the Forest Service and other federal agencies here. If you look back to the legacy of the timber wars in the West, in the ‘80s in particular, where you had clear-cutting of old growth, many of these environmental organizations were formed during that era. The term "tree hugger" came from that conversation. I think there is a real reason to be mistrustful and I don't want to minimize that.
What concerns me is philosophical disagreements about whether or not this work needs to be done, whether there is merit in it. Some organizations believe we should never do any mechanical thinning, or that prescribed fire is not the appropriate tool for stewardship and land management. Other organizations really get it: They just don't quite trust the Forest Service to be given free rein to go pursue it. It's easier to work with that latter group than with the folks who philosophically don't think we need to be doing this kind of work.
There are elements of the environmental community who believe we just need to sit back, let it burn because fire is natural. They ignore the fact that these landscapes, right now, because of human intervention, don't look like they did back when we did sit back and let them burn. We can't allow them to burn in that way — not just from a structural standpoint, because a lot of those groups will talk about how we need to make investments in the built environment to protect communities — But from a health impact when it comes to smoke, from an ecological standpoint, when it comes to protecting our watersheds and other species.
Lastly, we haven’t talked a lot about climate change here. Fire is not just something that is caused by climate change. It is something that is actively contributing to climate change. The 2020 fire season in California is a great example: that one fire season undid 20 years of the state's industrial emissions progress.
Say that again.
The carbon emissions from the 2020 fire season in California wiped out 20 years of the state's progress on industrial emissions reduction through its cap and trade program.
That's remarkable.
Yeah. We are headed towards catastrophe if we can't get a handle on this problem. If Alaska starts burning like the American West has been burning over the last decade, just pack your bags on the climate front. You could potentially put more carbon in the atmosphere than currently exists in the atmosphere. [NB: I was unable to independently verify this claim.]
What do people say to you in these conversations about why we shouldn't do controlled burns?
They say that we got in this mess because we tried to play God on these landscapes and we need to get out of the way. And again, I just think that completely ignores the history of what has happened since we have shaped these landscapes to make them less resilient to fire. And now we need to shape them to get back to a natural state. Once we start reintroducing fire, we can have conversations about letting fire in certain cases take its course where it makes sense and where it's healthy.
I'm curious about how people think about this philosophically. On the one hand, what you're describing is a "let nature take its course, we shouldn't play God" instinct. But on the other hand, there are cases where the opposition to fire management comes from a different perspective.
There's an example here from Berkeley, a project that was proposed in 2005, where a group sued to stop a plan to remove eucalyptus trees from UC Berkeley's campus. Eucalyptus trees are non-native, they're invasive. The idea was to take them out and replace them with native species. That project was proposed in 2005, and it remains tied up in litigation.
That’s a case where we're restoring something to the way it was before, and environmental groups are opposed to that. Help me understand.
Yeah, I think that's completely accurate. You know, I can't speak to what individual groups have been doing to sue on specific projects, but it's the sign of a broader problem, which is a permitting system that doesn't allow managers to make sound decisions in the context of our overall risk profile.
It's such an egregious example when you look at eucalyptus trees or other invasive species or species that are not native to California. But I do not want to lump in the broader movement with that, because there are a lot of really smart thinkers who understand the scale of this problem and just aren't sure how to get to a place where we can trust the Forest Service to make these decisions. That's where I spend my time trying to work.
You've mentioned NEPA already. It's one of the existing environmental laws that makes it harder to deal with fires and harder to do controlled burns. Will you talk a little bit about the role of the Clean Air Act in all this?
The Clean Air Act is really tricky. It was just not built for prescribed fire, let alone catastrophic wildfire. The largest source of new PM 2.5 emissions in the United States is wildfire smoke by far. While the Clean Air Act has been unequivocally successful at reducing industrial PM 2.5 emissions, there's no mechanism in the Clean Air Act to deal with fire, or with our best tool for mitigating fire, which in a lot of cases is prescribed fire.
So what you see, especially in California which has places that are not in compliance with the Clean Air Act, it's very hard for burn bosses to get good fire on the ground because they need to get regulatory approval. That's something we've been working with EPA on, and there are people that understand this problem, but it's really difficult to work within the contours of a bill that was not designed for this.
Just to go deeper there, wildfire combustion doesn't count towards Clean Air Act thresholds for the emissions that your state can create. So if a wildfire creates a ton of emissions, that doesn't count towards my limit, but controlled burns do count towards my limit.
That's exactly right.
So from a climate perspective, you're punished for doing controlled burns.
Correct.
As I understand it historically, this was just not on the radar of Clean Air Act writers. It was just not a piece of the puzzle, right?
It just wasn't the problem that it is now, right? It just wasn't something that we needed to consider in 1974 or in the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990.
In 2019, Governor Newsom launched this program called the California Vegetation Treatment Program. It was meant to fast-track approvals for critical forest restoration projects: a conscious effort to get ahead of what we just saw in LA.
More than two years later, according to an investigation, not a single project had been completed under that program. The investigation cited a couple things: bureaucratic bottlenecks and the state's "Byzantine environmental approval process" for slowing down approvals. What happened there?
I think that's very true. I think that they have overcome some of those obstacles in recent years. The wildfire task force in California has been doing really tremendous work at better coordinating activities around this, developing better metrics for wildfire resilience and working across jurisdictions to get fire on the ground.
We still have a long way to go, but they made very real progress in the last couple of years.
[From the Washington Free Beacon: “An independent state commission issued a report on the law in May, recommending reforms that allow "beneficial projects to proceed more rapidly, without sacrificing necessary environmental protections.”]
There's a database that California Wildfire and the Forest Resilience Task Force maintain, and through that treatment program, one report finds that between 2021 and 2023 only 55,000 acres in Southern California were treated. For context, the Angeles National Forest alone spans more than 650,000 acres.
Without making you speak for Governor Newsom here, what have the bureaucratic challenges been to that treatment plan?
Yeah. I mean, I think broadly speaking, it's a sign of a broader lack of focus on Southern California and the risk that is faced there, and a traditional focus on the forested landscapes. We saw the same thing with the spending through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Southern California did not get the same level of investment as other high-priority firesheds under the Department of Agriculture's wildfire crisis strategy. There's not enough focus in these areas and that needs to change and we need to push on getting into these landscapes in a much more robust way and I would say that's just — it's not unique to California. That's a fundamental issue for a variety of reasons.
You probably know this, but there were only two projects in that treatment program located in the LA metro area and they spanned like 130 acres combined, which is nothing.
It's a huge overall failure. I think the point is there's a lot of failure to go around.
I guess I'm curious about the timeline, because what happened this winter in LA was not necessarily a surprise, as you know. Many people saw this coming a mile away. So what does it say about the California political or regulatory system that all these people could see this coming and that the state couldn't fix it quickly enough?
Yeah. People are starting to understand the urgency of this problem, but we're not anywhere near acting with the urgency that the problem demands. California is actually doing a lot better than most states and the feds, in some ways, but they're not immune to that either.
Ultimately, these are human systems. Doing prevention work is always hard to act with the same urgency that it is during the fire. My parents have a large fire road up the street from their house in Topanga Canyon. I've been walking it for years, and sent some pictures of the fact that it wasn't well maintained to some folks at the state. I didn't hear anything back, and when I pushed them on this, they said, “That's a pending environmental review. We can't get in there right now.” Well, as soon as the fires broke out, bulldozers were coming up the hill and widening that road with no concern for the environmental impact of what they were doing, right? When an emergency happens, there's no shortage of urgency to go in and do these things.
Sure. I want to ask you about water law and water use in California.
I mean, I'm not a water policy expert at all. I will say that our overgrown forested landscapes are putting additional strain on already strained watersheds. That is a huge issue from a water management and fire resilience standpoint.
Explain that to somebody who's never left New York City.
Think about a tree as a giant straw that's sucking water out of the ground. If you remove fire from the landscape and therefore add a lot more trees that are naturally native to this area, it puts much greater strain on our watersheds by sucking more water. When you get areas that have been better maintained, you see fewer, larger, healthier trees. That's what you want to see here.
What kinds of trees are especially problematic? Non-native species especially?
It's really not just non-native species. It's whenever you have overly dense forested landscapes that are denser than their natural balance. You need fire to come through and take out dead and dying trees, and leave trees that can grow larger and be more resilient from fire.
Should the US Forest Service be headquartered out west instead of in D.C?
I think that it would be helpful to be closer to the problem in some cases, but I don't think that that's necessarily a silver bullet. There's a bill in Congress right now examining that, but I wouldn't put that at the top of my list of structural problems at the Forest Service.
I want to ask you about insurance. In 1988, California voters settled on a system where every time an insurance company wants to raise rates for cars or homes, they need a public hearing, and an elected insurance commissioner has to approve that rate increase.
As a result, it seems harder to raise insurance rates to the level that they should be at given risk, and it's much harder to insure people's homes for catastrophic wildfires. Would you agree with that assessment?
Yes, without question. I think we've got an insurance crisis everywhere in the country because of climate change. And so I don't want to overstate issues in California, but it is true that it is very hard for insurers to accurately price risk. In these areas, the insurance commissioner has been moving in the right direction in some ways, but we need to do a lot more to allow them to variably price risk and adequately price risk if we're going to have functioning markets in California and beyond.
When you say the Commissioner is moving in the right direction, what are you referring to?
So they've taken some steps to allow insurers to use catastrophic risk models and to price risk accordingly. We'd like to see a movement towards more granular assessments and being able to really price in mitigation efforts at the community scale and at the individual scale.
Will you describe FAIR for our listeners?
Yeah, so it's a California insurance plan that is a backstop to help provide coverage for people who can't get insurance in their areas. Ultimately the state is on the hook for loss, but it does allow people to buy some form of insurance in areas where they can't get any.
My understanding is that FAIR could be on the hook for something like 24 billion in the most recent fires. It has less than $3 billion in the tank right now.
Yeah. We've got huge solvency questions about the FAIR plan going forward: not just from these fires. This risk is not going anywhere, and a lot of folks are not really considering that this could put the state in a really catastrophic position and potential bankruptcy in a really bad fire season.
I didn’t know anything about California insurance until three weeks ago — I'm totally new to this. But one thing that struck me is that when FAIR runs out of money to pay claims, it's allowed to split its remaining costs with all the other licensed insurers in the state according to their market share. It basically levies a fine on big private insurers in the state, and it seems to be part of the dynamic driving insurers out of California.
I think that's right. I mean, it’s a really difficult political problem to solve: people are going to need access to some form of insurance, and if these carriers don't want to provide in these areas, you have to find a way to pay for your liability. But overall, we need to take a step back and completely rethink the way we manage insurance in the state.
Okay, let's go to your recommendations. You've mentioned you’d like more investment in fire mitigation and landscape management. What else is in the Matt Weiner Megafire playbook?
Megafire Action has three core areas. One is these investments in the landscape scale. Two is encouraging improved investment in the built environment. And the third is looking at all the new technologies that are coming online as a potential enabler for getting this job done smarter.
Most new technology in this space was focused traditionally on questions like, “How do we get 5 percent better at suppression?” That’s a worthy goal, but doesn't get at the core problem. Especially since the 2020 fire season, where the San Francisco skies turned red, we’ve seen a lot of new innovators and founders lending their skills and ideas and creativity to this problem. What you're seeing is a lot of investment in decision support, in real-time detection and in tracking of wildfires, which is something that we have the technology to do and we've made huge strides on, but we're not quite there yet in actually deploying it.
Taking a step back, there's no one entity in this country that is responsible for evaluating risk and making decisions about how to manage and deal with fire across jurisdictions and landscapes. There are really great entities that detect, track, monitor, and model risk, but there's no one entity that's responsible for looking across landscapes. We're leaving a ton of points on the board in terms of the way we manage fire holistically.
Let me push you on this, because I'm not sure I'm convinced. Why should fire be managed centrally or from one coordinated entity? Different landscapes have different needs, and we often trust folks on the ground to do better jobs of fire mitigation than other entities.
There are two pieces to this puzzle: one is the actual management of wildfire. That's a separate conversation from what we think is really important, which is the unification of decision support tools. If everyone can share a common operating picture of what's actually happening on the ground, that can help us prioritize what we're doing much better, because fire does not respect jurisdictions.
In the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, you had a detection, and it took some time for them to set out a spotter, figure out where the fire was burning, then send a response. We have the technology right now — and in fact, some of it's deployed by the Department of Defense at this moment — that can detect an ignition anywhere on the planet in real time. We're not using it to full effect. We should be able to immediately respond to these fires that we know are going to be catastrophic.
The dream is that from ignition, we know almost immediately whether this fire is likely to be catastrophic or not, whether it's likely to harm human health and structures or not, and we can respond in near-real time.
You were the executive director of the California Democratic Congressional Delegation: you advised Speaker Pelosi and 45 other members on wildfire policy, among other California policy matters. How wide was the range of views in the delegation on proper fire management and prevention?
So the job was kind of unique in Congress. No other state does this, but I was a shared employee among all 46 [at the time] of the Democrats from California. My job was to coordinate our efforts on all matters of statewide policy. I worked for all of them and was paid by all of them equally.
The biggest rift was over environmental regulation, which is not surprising. Last week, the House passed the Fix Our Forests Act, which is primarily permitting legislation that also has a really large focus on technology and innovation. There's pretty broad agreement on most of the provisions in that bill, and a pretty big disagreement around the permitting reform language. I will say a majority of the delegation did support that legislation. More than the rest of the [Democratic] caucus, you're seeing California members really understand the dynamics of this problem.
I will add that each time we've seen a major smoke event because of a bad wildfire season, the politics and the coalitions change. Smoke ends up being one of the great political coalition builders on this issue, because it affects areas that don't traditionally deal with fire. We saw that nationally after the Canadian wildfires two summers ago, where you saw DC, Chicago, New York blanketed in wildfire smoke. Suddenly you're getting interest from urban members who have not had any history of dealing with wildfire, wondering how they can get a handle on this problem.
I want to ask you about Prop 1 water projects in California. There's a bunch of money that's been committed by California voters to build water storage and improve state water facilities, but as late 2023, not one dam had been finished. So that's like a decade of environmental regulations and reviews. Did those holdups contribute to the scale and the destruction of LA fires? Are they a separate issue?
I think they're separate. There were some conversations about closed reservoirs and water availability, but at the end of the day, for most of the folks that I've talked to, those would not have necessarily changed what happened on the ground. I think what they are is a broader indication of a problem we have here, in falling in love with process over policy outcomes.
I do think that the Fix Our Forests Act is a really important case study on building new coalitions in a really contested Washington. The bill passed the House last week with 64 Democrats, even though it was written by the conservative chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Bruce Westerman [I initially thought this was a great case of nominative determinism, but Rep. Westerman is from the great state of Arkansas]. They worked in a really good faith way with [Democrat] Congressman Scott Peters out of San Diego. Increasingly, Democrats are open to coming along in these conversations.
You’re also seeing a lot of interest from Republicans and the incoming administration in looking at systems change and issues that are holding up progress in the wildfire space broadly. We think we're at a really unique moment, even with joint Republican control in Congress, where a lot of good could happen here in a bipartisan way. I think it's almost unique when it comes to issues that touch the environment and the climate.
Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), who's the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is taking a look at things like making the Forest Service chief's position a political appointment, and bringing more political appointments into the agency. We've heard newly elected Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT), who comes from the aviation suppression world, talk about the need for structural reform among the agencies, perhaps a unified national federal wildfire force. [After this interview was recorded, Senator Sheehy introduced a bill with Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) to create a new National Wildland Firefighting Service within the Interior Department.]
You've seen proposals to bring the Forest Service back into the Department of Interior, which I think is intriguing, so that you can have a more unified approach to mediation under one agency umbrella, instead of having this over at a traditionally commodity-focused agency.
Would the logging industry traditionally be opposed to moving the Forest Service into the Department of the Interior? Would that be the roadblock?
I don't necessarily think so. We're not taking a lot of timber off federal land in the way that we did back in the day. It's not a commodity-focused agency in the same way that it was before and during the timber wars. In some ways — it depends on who you talk to — but some timber companies are happy not to have the competition from federal land, because they operate their own private land where they have timber stock. So it depends.
Broadly speaking, I think there will be opposition to those kinds of ideas — and some of it will be really good points, to be totally honest — but I think from a fire management standpoint, we need more unification at the federal level.
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