What Caused the Devastating California Fires and What Could Have Prevented Them? Edward Ring Explains

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “The fires themselves are pretty much out. There’s a few smoldering remains, but the trouble has just begun,” says Edward Ring, director of Water and Energy Policy for the California Policy Center. “It’s going to be very hard to get everything rebuilt in Los Angeles.”

In this episode, we do a deep dive on the California wildfires. How did they originate? Why was the devastation so horrific? Could they have been prevented? What is the scope of the damage? And in the aftermath, what should be done?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Edward Ring, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Edward Ring:
Thank you for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
We’re pretty much in the aftermath of these giant fires in the L.A. area. Tell me if that’s correct. What is the big challenge facing the region right now ?

Mr. Ring:
The fires themselves are pretty much out. There’s a few smoldering remains, but the trouble has just begun. This is the acute catastrophe that we’ve seen. It’s a tragedy. I can’t really express in words how bad it must be for the people that have gone through it. But it’s going to be very hard to get everything rebuilt in Los Angeles, and I think that’s just begun.

Why should that be so difficult? Even in a situation where all you had to do was find the contractors and turn in the plans and get ready and start building, it’s still an ordeal. You have to finance all of that. That’s going to be a problem. And you have to do the actual work. But what’s happening, especially in somewhere like California and especially in somewhere like Los Angeles County, is the amount of permitting that you have to get in a normal situation.

Let’s say where there is no fire and the sewers and the water mains and the power lines and the gas lines are all intact. You know, it still takes on average about three years to go through the full permit process to build a house in Los Angeles County. So imagine how much more complicated that process is going to be now when not only do you have an avalanche of applications that these agencies are going to receive, they’re going to be handling a volume of requests that’s unprecedented, but they’re also, of course, going to be dealing with all of the things that have to be managed in the aftermath of a fire, all of the debris, all of the reconstruction of the infrastructure surrounding these homes. So this is a challenge that’s just begun, and it’s going to be especially difficult in Los Angeles County.

Mr. Jekielek:
Surely there’s a way to fast track this in this kind of extreme scenario.

Mr. Ring:
We hope so. I think the latest that I just saw was that Mayor Bass is thinking about involving a contractor to go in andreconstruct blocks of housing. I’m not sure, and it’s very early. We’re just hearing about this and we don’t know exactly what she means by that. But that doesn’t strike me at first glance as the most desirable direction. What ideally should happen is if you have architects that are certified that are putting forward plans that are basically identical to what was destroyed for the replacement home, maybe with some allowances for maybe a higher ceiling or a slightly enlarged footprint for the home, but something that’s substantially the same submitted by a certified architect.

It should just be permitted. It should sail through all of the various agencies that have a hand in these approvals, because you’re just replacing what had been there and what had been there was fine. They also have to waive some of the new requirements. A lot of new construction nowadays requires things that previously weren’t required in homes, the solar panels on the roofs, and sprinkler systems. By the way, if you talk with firefighters, the mandatory sprinkler systems in new construction, if you make them sensitive enough to go off when there’s a fire, they could also go off when there isn’t a fire, because something that triggers them. Then they’re going to cause more damage than most fires would.

Whereas, smoke detectors, when they go off and they’re more easily triggered, because you don’t have to worry about the consequences quite so much, that’s an immediate warning. Smoke detectors, in many respects, are more effective than sprinklers. But sprinklers are mandated for new construction and they are very expensive. There are other things that are mandated for new construction. They’re taking away a lot of the gas lines in new construction just to pay for the cost of the solar panels, for example.

Nothing’s affordable in California, but you can’t get closer to an affordable home if you have to put in a gas line and put in solar panels on the roof. So all of these new requirements should either be waived for replacement housing or minimized. That’s another big challenge that they face. Getting these homes built in a streamlined way is going to require stripping away a lot of these requirements, bypassing a lot of these agencies if you have a certified architect.

But so far, we’re not getting the impression that, despite what their rhetoric indicates, that the mayor and the city of Los Angeles is really going to make a concerted effort to do that. We can hope that President Trump is going to be able to apply pressure on the city to pursue solutions that would be faster and involve a more diverse assortment of contractors instead of some kind of centrally planned solution, which seems to be the direction they’re going in. But we have to wait and see.

Mr. Jekielek:
Edward, please give us a sense of the size and scope of the devastation.

Mr. Ring:
It’s unbelievable. I actually traveled down there on Friday. I was invited to the president’s roundtable and press conference. I had an intimate glimpse of not only what’s going on down there, but also the response, at least from the federal government so far. The first thing I noticed was I couldn’t get an Uber from Los Angeles International Airport to Pacific Palisades. It said no service and that was my first inkling that something was very different.

I ended up getting a taxi. I just gave them the address. We started driving and we got to within about five miles of the destination. We started seeing burned homes here and there along Sunset Boulevard and in the foothills of West Los Angeles. We started seeing Humvees and military police stationed at intersections.

Then we came to a checkpoint where there were a whole bunch of soldiers and they said, you can’t go any further. I presented my identification and they checked with the Secret Service and they said, all right, you can go through but your driver can’t go through. We ended up getting a motorcycle escort for the driver and now we go into the burnscape.

From that point on, everything was burned. This went for a couple of miles, where on both sides of the road, all you saw was burned-out hulks of cars, in some cases melted portions of the car, chimneys here and there, and a tree or a shrub that was just scorched with no leaves left, just charred branches. That was a devastating thing to see. It sounds a little bit trite. You can’t possibly convey this with enough respect to really fulfill just how big this tragedy was for people who have gone through it.

There have been some comparisons made to other cities, for example, to Manhattan Island and so forth. Do you have a sense of the size of this?
Well, there were two big areas that got hit really, really bad. One was Pacific Palisades and the other was Altadena. Pacific Palisades is more towards the coast. There’s an exact number that somebody’s got, but you’re looking at about six square miles in Pacific Palisades would be my estimate, and maybe approximately the same area in Altadena.

That is so many homes. The estimate is about 10,000 to 15,000 homes burned. That’s the range. They don’t know yet how many people died. They don’t know exactly how many homes are destroyed. But it’s in the thousands. It’s well over 10,000 homes that have been burnt to the ground.

Mr. Jekielek:
At this point, given everything you know, how would you characterize the cause of the fire or the causes?

Mr. Ring:
With the cause of the fire, there’s the spark that started the fire. I don’t think they’re certain. There’s already lawsuits being filed saying that it was caused by a power line. You get the Santa Ana winds blowing at 50 to 100 miles an hour and that is not a unique event. That happens in Los Angeles periodically, almost every year. There are Santa Ana winds that are very strong winds coming from inland. Some years they’re more severe than others. This was a bad year, but there were bad years 100 years ago.

But you’re blowing the trees around. So even if you’ve trimmed very responsibly, you can still have a tree that’s going to get knocked over by the wind and it’s going to hit the power line. And what really should be done is those power lines should be put underground in any fire-prone neighborhood. But that’s one of the possible causes.

According to members of the fire department, 50% of the reported fires in Los Angeles apparently are caused by homeless encampments. It’s January. They’re trying to stay warm and they’ll set up camps in the canyons, in the vacant lots and so forth. So that’s another potential cause. Then there could be some accidents that cause fires. Arson causes fires. You can’t take care of all of that.

We could help our homeless population by putting them in congregate shelters and getting them the help they need instead of allowing special interests to build, you know, half-million to million-dollar apartments, which is never going to house more than a small fraction of them. You know, there’s policies that could be changed and might largely eliminate that potential cause of fires as well as solve a lot of other problems like helping these people get their lives back. But ultimately, you’re still going to have fires.

And the question then is, you know, how can you mitigate the fuel that these fires consume so they won’t be as severe? And then when they do start, how do you fight them? I think the bigger issue is how do you mitigate the fuel? Back 100 years ago, they used to graze sheep in the Santa Monica Mountains, and there would be fires that would inevitably blow through there, but they wouldn’t be as severe.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve actually taken classes in forestry management. Most areas have a fire cycle and over some period of time, a few hundred years perhaps, an entire area will burn. However, if you stop that fire cycle in some way, the brush will build up and you can get these super fires if you’re not managing the forest. This is from Forestry 101. How does this fit into this equation?

Mr. Ring:
That equation applies very obviously with our conifer forests because there you have marketable timber and the private sector could simply responsibly log those forests and you would have a lot less of these super fires because they would be going in there and doing the thinning. You either have to thin the forests or you have to let them burn. If you do neither, exactly what you described is what happens.

Now, in the chaparral, that is the oak woodland and scrub that defines the canyons and mountains around the foothill neighborhoods in Los Angeles, you don’t have marketable timber. Not really. I mean, I guess that wouldn’t be a that wouldn’t be a commercial solution. Let’s put it that way.

But you could have grazing and grazing is strictly regulated now. That’s not I’m not saying they’re not doing any of it, but they’re not doing enough of it. You know, a lot of these property owners and you can see this, it’s coming to light now because there’s more attention being paid to it. But for years, you know, they’ve been clamoring for the right to go into those canyons adjacent to their homes and clear out the dead brush, or at least to get the county to do it.

But what happens is most of the money, public money, that would go to brush clearing and private money, if you’re trying to acquire the permits, it all goes to either the process, you know, the application process or litigation. There’s a lot of environmentalist litigation to stop some of this. There are regulations from the California Air Resources Board. It’s very hard to get a burn permit through the California Air Resources Board. That is very ironic when you think about the amount of filth that got belched up into the air from these fires. If you do these small fires, you do small prescribed burns, you do grazing, you do mechanical thinning, you can then bring the fuel load down.

Now, having said that, we have to acknowledge that unless you just strip the canyons bare, which nobody thinks is a good idea, there’s going to be fuel and there’s going to be fires. It’s just the Santa Ana winds are going to blow. There’s going to be vegetation in these pretty dry, you know, it’s an arid climate. At certain times of year, you’re going to have severe fire danger.

But those fires would not be as severe as the ones that we just experienced because they would have cut the fuel load by a half or by two-thirds. There just wouldn’t have been enough to burn and they still would have been healthy landscapes. A lot of the environmentalists who look at this have a biased point of view. One of the things that we really need to do is have alternative land management plans proposed, and have another way to manage these canyons.

What we’re up against is technology. If you can detect a genomic variant in a lizard, for example, you can say that the lizard is endangered because that genomic variant only exists in Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles County, right? The same analogy applies to things like PFAS, the persistent chemicals in water. We now have the ability to measure PFAS down to parts per trillion. All of a sudden, we have to screen for parts per trillion, because we’ve developed the technology to measure the parts per trillion.

We’re in this race with technology where the environmentalist community is taking advantage, and I don’t mean that in a cynical way. I’m just saying they’re using technology to identify, you know, subspecies and subspecies genetically. And they’re using it to identify chemicals at a parts per trillion level and regulating on that basis.

There’s no end to that. At some point we have to step back and we need other experts to get involved with these analyses to say, you know, that’s going too far. That’s beyond what is an appropriate balance between what we need for the environment and what we need for public health and what we can afford and what’s actually necessary and reasonable.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have done quite a bit of thinking about what is good for the environment in your work. Please tell us about your background. When you say the environmentalist, you yourself aren’t an environmentalist by that token. Please explain.

Mr. Ring:
I think that the environmentalist movement is absolutely vital. In California, we got lead out of gasoline in the 1960s and 70s. You couldn’t even see the hills five miles away in Los Angeles or the Santa Clara Valley. Those kinds of advances were absolutely necessary. They were about to fill in the San Francisco Bay in the 1960s. There are cities on the Bay, Redwood Shores and Foster City, that are all landfill. They were going to go ahead and fill it up and I’m glad they didn’t. So those kinds of things are very important.

The California condor was saved. And they were down to like 25 birds, something like that. And they took them all into captivity. They had a captive breeding program and they finally started releasing them again. They spent millions and millions of dollars doing that, and I’m glad they did. You know, we got about 500 of them now flying around in the wild. They’re the most beautiful, majestic birds.

Let’s take mountain lions. Mountain lions were endangered in California. They were down to six, I think around 600 of them. They estimate now that the counts are well over 6,000, 6,000, 7,000 mountain lions roaming around. Do we need mountain lions in every single habitat where they can thrive? Do we need them in the suburbs of Pasadena or the Santa Monica Mountains in Bel Air, Beverly Hills, and Pacific Palisades? When do you ask, all right, do we have enough mountain lions?

I love mountain lions. They’re beautiful. It’s an emotional thing. It’s a very emotional argument when somebody says, we’ve got to protect these mountain lions. You can look at the photographs of these animals. Yes, I’m an environmentalist, but I think that environmentalism itself has gotten out of balance. It’s going too far. And I think it’s being dominated a lot by special interests nowadays.

Mr. Jekielek:
There has been a lot of talk about this empty reservoir with the cover that was broken. How much did limited water supply actually play
into this? How much is that limited water supply a function of what people are doing? How much water is actually available?

Mr. Ring:
A lot of that has been overstated a bit. There are two aspects to water supply. There’s how much water are you delivering to California cities? How much water is available? And our urban areas in California have gone from 7.5 million acre-feet a year back in 1985. It’s still 7.5 million acre-feet a year. It went up to 9 million on average in the 90s. Through conservation, they’ve gotten it back down.

So what we have now is an urban population that’s gone from 25 million to 36 million people using the same amount of water. In the California water plan, they targeted 10 million acre feet for California cities. That’s how much water they intended to store and divert and transport to California cities through the state water project. And we’re at 75% of that.

Let’s say we had gone ahead and fulfilled the California State Water Project goal. We would be delivering 33% more water to our cities, which means that the pipes in all of the suburbs and the pump stations into all the foothill reservoirs and holding tanks would be presumably 33% greater capacity.
That’s not enough to knock down a terrible fire.

But in a macro sense, it’s still consequential. It means we’re dehydrating our cities. We’re killing our lawns. In most cities, the trees that were on those lawns developed surface roots because they were drinking the irrigation water that was used for the lawn. So if you kill all your lawns, you’re going to kill a lot of your trees. That sort of dehydration raises the temperature in our cities. It lowers the humidity in our cities.

So there’s an argument to be made that we ought to be delivering more water to our cities, and we ought to be figuring out a safe, sustainable way to do that. There are ways to do that safely and sustainably and without addressing a lot of the environmental concerns. But to say that if we had more water going south and going into our cities, we could have put out this fire is, I think, inaccurate.

When we talk about the hydrants and how they lost pressure, if you open up a whole bunch of hydrants on a street, you’re going to lose pressure pretty fast, you know, not right away, but pretty fast, which goes back to the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which was built in the 1950s. It holds 300 acre feet, about 110 million gallons. Governor Newsom was saying,, there was water up there because there are some tanks as well.

But the tanks only held about 10 million gallons, about 10% of what they could have gotten out of that reservoir. That reservoir was emptied for maintenance of the cover because it’s treated water. That’s a job that people familiar with the work say it could have been done in three or four weeks, but it was still empty when this fire happened.

It is fair to say that had that reservoir been full, they would have had water a lot longer and they could have fought the fires a lot longer. They could have put a lot more water on the fires. But that works at the margin. If you have a fire that you’re catching real early and you have a little bit or a lot more water, but not an overwhelming fire, you might win.

You might put the fire out before it gets too big. But by the time that fire was blasting its way through Pacific Palisades, it’s debatable whether they could have gotten it if that reservoir had been full. They probably still would have had a fire that went out of control.

Mr. Jekielek:
Another thing that’s been floated as being a contributor to the problems by a number of people is the prevalence of diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Do you think that figures into these equations?

Mr. Ring:
That’s a loaded question, isn’t it? That’s one of those trillion dollar questions. In general, in the United States, we need to get away from that. We’re seeing it impact a lot of industries and it impacts our competitiveness as a nation. Frankly, it’s a slap in the face to people who are qualified, who happen to also fulfill DEI criteria, because we never know if they were elevated and promoted or hired based on their identity vs. being hired based on their competence.

In general, I think it’s harmful to America. It also breeds resentment and divisiveness, and I think it’s just an unhealthy way to try to achieve equality of opportunity and optimal outcomes for most people. I think you have to reward merit exclusively, really. Did it affect the competence of the response? I’ve actually heard some of the firefighters and talked with some of them who have said some of their firefighting teams are less capable because they have people on the teams who can’t carry their body weight. And it takes more than just brawn to be a good firefighter. You’re operating some pretty sophisticated equipment and you have to make very fast decisions.

You’ve got to know your stuff. If they water down the exams so they can bring in everybody according to identity quotas, it’s impossible to have group outcomes. You have to pick and choose your words when you talk about this, but you’re never going to have every single group in a society able to perform at precisely the same level of confidence. That’s impossible. So if you’re going to set those kinds of quotas, there’s no way out of a consequence, which is going to be you’re going to have people on your team that aren’t as qualified as some of the other people on the team or as qualified as some of the people who could have taken those jobs.

Again, it’s a slap in the face to the people who are qualified for those jobs, who are members of identity groups that we’re trying to represent adequately. Because the ones who are competent and are members of those groups are always going to have to prove somehow that they weren’t hired or promoted because of their identity. And that’s not fair to them, you know.

When it comes to the chiefs, the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power belongs to a protected status group. The chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department belongs to a protected status group. I’m sure they’re not terribly comfortable about this now, or maybe they are. But they’ve been very public about diversity.

What they should have been public about was the fact that we’re not getting some kind of green light to go in and clean out the fuel in our canyons, and we’re not upgrading our equipment. That’s where they should have been getting on talk shows and holding press conferences and making all kinds of noise. It should have been about those issues. It doesn’t look good.

Instead, they got on the talk shows and they did press conferences where they’re talking about diversity. That looks really bad now. You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it’s a medical call or a fire call, that looks like you. It gives that person a little bit more ease, knowing that somebody might understand their situation better. Is she strong enough to do this? Or you couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire, which my response is, he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.

Even if they are extraordinarily competent, it indicates that they weren’t spending quality time because they only have so much time. These are busy people in these executive positions. Why were they spending all that time on diversity when their equipment was not adequate and the regulatory environment that they were coping with was also not adequate? That’s where they should have been spending their focus. So you can be critical of that.

Mr. Jekielek:
You told me about your qualifications as an environmentalist. Please give us a thumbnail of your background, and how you came to your current work.

Mr. Ring:
That’s an interesting question, because what qualifies someone to be an environmentalist? I mean, we have politicians that are extremely outspoken about the climate crisis, for example, who haven’t got the remotest
understanding of what the actual science is behind the climate crisis. And so they talk to experts who typically will verify a political agenda that they’ve got.

So they find somebody that has a compatible scientific theory, and then they go out and they talk about it. I don’t have the scientific background myself to be an expert on all of these matters. I have to rely on what I learn from experts. And it’s very multidisciplinary, right? If you want to have an opinion about climate change, there’s meteorology, there’s astronomy, there’s geology, there’s atmospheric science, there’s computer modeling, and there’s all kinds of types of expertise you need.

So that’s one of the reasons that climate science is far more unsettled than a lot of the people that think we have a climate crisis will claim. This is a complex issue. Environmentalism touches everything. It touches everything we do. One set of technical skills that I bring is in finance, and I like numbers.

For example, when I look at our water policy or I look at our energy policy, I’m able to make judgments about whether or not it’s practical to replace all of our energy generation with so-called renewables. I can look at the numbers and I can prove that it’s almost impossible to eliminate fossil fuels in the world anytime soon. If you’re an environmentalist, you want to ask yourself, all right, what is my choice? Am I going to destroy the global economy and start World War III over renewables? Or am I going to compromise on these questions?

Mr. Jekielek:
How did you come to be working at the California Policy Center?

Mr. Ring:
I worked in startups for the first half of my career, primarily in Silicon Valley. Again, I have a pretty visceral impression of what it takes to survive in the private sector. I was involved with some media companies, and I started up my own at one point. I started an online magazine called EcoWorld in the late 1990s, and I ended up selling it in 2009.

In the process of writing about clean technology and species and ecosystems and trying to communicate the things I was learning online about those things. I got involved with a conference company and produced clean technology conferences. We did five of them, three in San Francisco and two in Boston that were really well received. I mean, it brought in investment bankers and venture capitalists and clean technology entrepreneurs from all over the world. I was very privileged to be involved with that.

That was quite an exposure for me, you know, to learn about all of the emerging technologies. It’s not just energy, it’s water, it’s land management, it’s all of the resources, all of the mining, all of the civil engineering, you know, it touches everything. And that was a fascinating experience. That was 2009 and I think we did one in 2010.

But after I sold the website EcoWorld, I talked with my wife. I said, I’d like to get involved in politics as a policy analyst. We live in the Sacramento area, so I got involved with some organizations that were working on ballot initiatives for public sector union reform, actually. That’s a whole separate topic, obviously.

But when we failed to get an initiative on the ballot, we got an initiative on the ballot, the state ballot in 2012. The opposition spent about five times as much as we did, so they were able to defeat it. We decided it was time to engage in public education, so we formed the California Policy Center in 2013.

Mr. Jekielek:
You use the term crony environmentalism. What does that mean?

Mr. Ring:
Yes, that’s probably a good term. I think it’s descriptive. Special interest dominated-environmentalism would be another applicable term. You could even call it the climate change or climate crisis industrial complex or Environmentalism, Inc. There’s a lot of cases where special interests have a tremendous stake in environmental regulation.

With carbon offset trading, these projects are supposedly going to sequester CO2, and they could be forestry projects. The New Yorker actually ran an expose where they talked about a forestry project that was accepting carbon credits. You fund the forestry project according to how much CO2 the forestry project will sequester. And then you’re buying emission permits in exchange for funding this forest that will presumably absorb the emissions that you’re generating.

It’s like if you go to a bank and you say you have collateral and you get a loan, and then you go to another bank and you use the same collateral for a second loan. They were doing the same thing with their forest. They were selling the carbon offset credits multiple times. And in other words, it’s just a magnet for corruption, these carbon offset projects.

Think about what carbon trading is. Everything we do involves emissions in some way—everything. If you impose regulations on emissions, the so-called free market solution is to trade the rights to emit things. It’s like taking a percentage of every economic transaction on the planet. That’s what carbon trading ultimately is, if you’re getting a commission on every single transaction in the world, every single bit of economic activity. And you can go downstream from there.

You’ve got all these renewables projects that don’t make any economic sense. There are people getting hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to build pipelines to bury CO2 underground. I may have to close my plant if I don’t build a 25-mile, $600 million pipeline to get my emissions to the nearest underground formation so I can pump my emissions underground.
If I don’t do this, I’m going to have to fire everybody because I can’t run my plant anymore. It emits too much CO2. But I’ll take the $600 million in subsidies. I don’t think a lot of these folks believe that this stuff is a hazard.

But I also sympathize with the fact that if they don’t acknowledge it publicly, and they’re not going to get the subsidies, and if they don’t get the subsidies, they’re not going to be able to operate anymore. So who’s building that pipeline? Why wouldn’t they be willing to say, we ought to be building a pipeline to move water, or maybe we should be building a pipeline to move natural gas. But instead, they’re building a pipeline to move CO2 and pump it underground. You can ask yourself whether or not that’s an example of environmentalism, Inc., or the environmentalist industrial complex.

Look at offshore wind. Offshore wind doesn’t make any economic sense, especially the floating offshore wind they’re proposing for the state of California. They want to tow 1,000-foot-high, 10 to 12-megawatt wind turbines 20 miles offshore and then anchor them with guy wires to tethering anchors 4,000 feet down, because the continental shelf drops right away in California.

They want to have high voltage transmission lines underwater to traverse 20 miles of sea floor to receiving stations and transformers and batteries onshore. Then they’ve got to get them over the mountains to the main lines on the California power grid so they can tap into the high voltage lines and deliver that power to big metropolitan areas. We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. There’s evidence that these turbines and saltwater environments have to be replaced every 10 years. How are you going to get out there and do that?

Where’s the California Coastal Commission? There are very powerful special interests that want to build this stuff because they know that the taxpayers are going to have to subsidize it. It’s a profitable business for them. Look at the EV industry. Even Elon Musk, who stands to have commercial setbacks if they don’t mandate electric vehicles right away, is saying we ought to have a natural evolution from gasoline-powered cars to EVs. But the lobbyists for the EV industry are saying, climate change. Let’s get rid of the cars. There are just a lot of examples of what I would characterize as crony environmentalism.

Mr. Jekielek:
Just to verify, you’re against this climate alarmism, not the concept that climate change exists.

Mr. Ring:
I think that even if you are very, very alarmed about climate change, you should be more urgently in favor of some of the things that we’ve been talking about that aren’t being done because of environmentalist regulations. Forest management is a perfect example. Offshore wind is going to harm the marine environment a great deal and the marine species. Climate change may or may not be a crisis. I’m not going to pretend. I guess you could call me a warmist. That is actually a term they’re using now. They call us warmists.

There might be something that’s anthropogenically caused that’s causing our Earth to warm moderately. There might be a step change. We’re going up two parts per million each year in atmospheric CO2. That’s a very gradual shift. There’s all these horror stories. What if we release all the methane in the Arctic because the permafrost melts? Then all of a sudden we’re way up. So there could be a step change like that. But you have to manage the risk against the cost. The cost of precipitously eliminating fossil fuel is a bigger and a more certain catastrophe.

Mr. Jekielek:
Tell us about this question of insurance. Why is it that apparently a number of insurance companies were quitting homeowners in the year prior to these fires happening? How big an issue is that in the aftermath?

Mr. Ring:
It’s a very big issue, and a very complicated issue. The insurance companies got out for a couple of reasons, the ones who did. They got out because they weren’t seeing any evidence that we were taking the kind of precautions we needed to take in order to mitigate fire risk. You can talk about cities that are up in the conifer forests in Northern California. The city of Paradise actually lost more homes in the fires of 2018.

They lost more homes than were lost in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. Wikipedia says it’s only 11,000 homes, but Congressman LaMalfa, who represents that area, says it was 18,000 homes, and I tend to believe him. Again, you can’t prevent all these fires, but if you manage the forest appropriately, you can prevent a lot of them.

There’s Shaver Lake, which is administered by Southern California Edison. It’s a watershed and a lake, a reservoir in the central Sierras that has 20,000 acres of managed forest owned by the utility surrounding it. And they’ve been doing what they call total ecosystem management with thinning, burning and selective timber harvests for the last 40 years. There was a fire that burned 300,000 acres in 2020 in that area. And it literally went all the way around Shaver Lake and the watershed, the 20,000 acres in Shaver Lake, didn’t burn.

The wildlife biologists, and I’ve talked to the current one and the retired two of them who have managed that property over these decades, claim that the species counts are actually higher in those forests. The species actually thrive more than in, for example, the national forests in California,
which are almost completely hands-off. And of course, if you have a catastrophic fire in those forests, the species are, you know, they’re wiped out. So that wasn’t being done.

The insurance companies looked at these communities all over the urban wildlife interface areas. They said, there’s too much risk. We can’t write premiums for these people anymore. And they eventually, you know, looked at the situation in the foothills of Los Angeles and said, these neighborhoods are equally vulnerable. We can’t write insurance policies.

The other reason they couldn’t write insurance policies is because they weren’t permitted to raise their rates by the state of California to recognize the elevated risk. They also were prohibited from passing on the reinsurance costs because if they see elevated risk, these insurance companies themselves have insurance, the reinsurance or the assurers. Those companies would look at the risk profiles in these areas and say, we will issue you reinsurance policies, but you’re going to have to pay more because we see more risk.

Then the state of California wasn’t allowing the retail insurance companies to pass those costs on in the form of higher premiums. The state of California also made it difficult for out-of-state insurance companies to come into California and compete. So all of those things combined to make the insurance companies, a lot of them, leave. And now, you know, the companies that are left are in a pretty bad position, but less bad because they already canceled some of the policies. Those people had to go to what’s called the FAIR plan, Fair Access to Insurance Requirements, set up by the state of California. They estimate the damage from this fire to be about $250 billion. That’s the latest number I saw.

Who knows? No one knows yet. But we do know how much money they’ve got in the FAIR program, which is less than 300 million. It’s maybe one-tenth of one percent of the amount. FAIR’s share of all these claims that are on the way is not 100 percent of the claims, but let’s say it’s 10 percent of the claims. That’s 25 billion, and they’ve got less than 300 million to work with. So they’re in a pretty desperate situation, and there’s no way out of it apart from a federal bailout.

Hopefully, the federal bailout will have some terms and conditions to reform some of the regulations. If you have elevated risk of fire, then you’re going to have more claims. Then through overregulation you have elevated costs to rebuild. It costs $400 to $500 a square foot to construct a home in California. Whereas, the best state was Arkansas at $150 a square foot. Maybe they don’t have enough regulations in Arkansas.

But we have to find some kind of balance, and we have to deregulate enough so that people can construct homes at an affordable cost per square foot. If we did that, not only would we have fewer claims because we’d done something with our wildfire management prevention policies, but the claims themselves would be lower because the rebuilding cost would be lower. So on both ends of that equation, the insurance companies in California had a really challenging situation.

Mr. Jekielek:
Give us a framework for how to take the next steps. You talked about how to get insurance companies to be interested again. We talked about getting rid of some of the red tape and bureaucracy to be able to start building quicker. What else needs to happen now to move forward?

Mr. Ring:
When the president visited Palisades on Friday, we were asked to come
up with a list of the laws and regulations in California that ought to be scrapped. A lot of people were asked that question, so a lot of people are going to be presenting their list. My list, which is based on getting a hold of land use attorneys and water rights attorneys, builders, civil engineers, foresters, has 50 recommendations already. There’s so many of them and some of them are explicitly for forestry. Others, like the California Environmental Quality Act, affect everything.

There’s all kinds, you can’t just scrap it. There’s an assortment of ways to reform it. It’s an overwhelming list of things that California does that nobody else does, or that maybe Massachusetts does and New York does. I was talking to a controller for a land developer in Texas a few years ago, and he said, yeah, we had to pay, our building permit was $2,500. And we were astonished, you know, because in California, it’s anywhere from 50 to 100, or even over $100,000. And we said, $2,500 per home?

And he goes, no, that was for the whole subdivision. They can put their plans forward in Texas and get approval in weeks, sometimes days. In California, it can take decades. It can literally take decades to build a subdivision in California. You’re litigating and you’re jumping through hoops. If it’s a big subdivision with 600 homes, you will spend decades and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get approval to build it. The list is overwhelming.

The California Environmental Quality Act is probably the one that everybody talks about the most. In 1970, when that was passed, it was the first of its kind in the nation. All it said was, put together a statement. When you apply for a building, if you have an impact on the environment, describe what it is and describe what you’re going to do about it. People would turn in two or three page documents with a reasonable assessment of what was going on.

Again, this was before we had the genomics and before we had the chemistry to look for parts per trillion and little genetic variants in single species management. And they would get approval. We’re not filling in the bay. Okay. We’re not knocking down the whole forest. It was reasonable precautions that people had to take. Now, the California Environmental Quality Act requires documents that can be volumes, and they have to go through a lead agency.

I have a flow chart I posted showing the process. Sometimes there’s more than one lead or so-called responsible agency. But you have to get that thing through the California Air Resources Board. You have to get it through the Coastal Commission, if it’s within five miles of the coast. You’ve got to go through the responsible agency. It may be the county, so you’ve got to go there. And you have all these agencies that have to sign off on it.

At every stage in the process, you could face any third-party attorney, not somebody with standing in the community who maybe doesn’t want a subdivision on the hillside next to their home. That person would have standing. No, it can be anybody. There are law firms in other states that just fly into California because it’s such a positive. This goes back to crony environmentalism. It’s a business model.

Have you heard of sue and settle? During the Obama administration, that really got out of control, where environmentalist groups would sue an environmental protection agency over some alleged misconduct that’s going on on a piece of land or with a manufacturing plant or whatever. and the EPA would immediately settle and give them $100 million. It’s a business model.

They’re not all frivolous. I’m not claiming they are, and I don’t want to come across like every single lawsuit is frivolous, but so many of them are. This California Environmental Quality Act, for example, could maybe say third parties cannot sue. It has to be just the district attorney in the county or the state’s attorney general. And that’s it. And limit it to them. That would be a huge reform.

So there are ways to try to fix the California Environmental Quality Act. The governor claims he’s going to exempt a new home building from the California Environmental Quality Act. That will help. But there’s all kinds of other environmental regulations that they’re going to have to navigate in any way. So it’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out.

Again, to answer that question in detail would be very difficult. But in practice, functionally speaking, we’ve got to streamline the process to rebuild, and we’ve got to start managing our forests and our wildlands in a way that is going to reduce the fuel load. We need to invest in practical water and energy infrastructure in the state instead of all of these heavily subsidized experiments.

Mr. Jekielek:
Edward, this has been a fascinating discussion. Any final thoughts as we finish?

Mr. Ring:
California is a state where they equate sustainability with scarcity. You know, they want to ration water. They want to get our water consumption down even further. They want to be super energy efficient. And, you know, and there’s nothing wrong with either of those things. There’s nothing wrong with conservation and efficiency, but it goes too far and then it becomes an economic drain.

Instead of recognizing scarcity as our only path to sustainability, let’s look for ways to sustainably create abundance. Let’s be realistic about what the rest of the world is willing to do. Because if California wants to set an example to the world, it’s got to be an example that people are going to follow.

For example, let’s not close down all of our natural gas power plants. Let’s instead retrofit them to use the absolute state-of-the-art combined cycle technologies where we can get 70-plus percent efficiency in terms of the natural gas going into the generating plant and the electricity coming out. Because a lot of these plants, especially the peakers that they made to turn on and off to cover for renewable energy, they’re only 30 percent efficient. You could double or more the efficiency of these plants. If they’re trying to develop more energy for the grid, let’s say in Jakarta, they’re not going to install a bunch of solar panels and batteries because it costs too much and it takes up too much space, but they would retrofit their natural gas power plant.

Those kinds of choices are choices that Californians should be making if they want to set an example for the world. If we’re not doing this to set an example for the world, it’s irrelevant. We’re only 1% of the world’s energy consumption here in California. So whatever we do to our own population in terms of being on the bleeding edge and making everyone pay, you know, so much more for all of our necessities and creating all this scarcity isn’t going to change the world. It’s just going to make us poorer.

We have to think about what kind of solutions, things like advanced hybrids instead of all EV, things that people in the rest of the world are going to want to emulate. That’s where we should be focusing our investment and our innovation. I’m hoping that Californians are going to realign behind an abundance agenda, instead of a scarcity agenda.

Mr. Jekielek:
Edward Ring, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Ring:
Thank you very much.