California is burning once again, with terrifying and terrible outcomes for residents who are seeing their homes reduced to ashes. Cue the predictable assertions that only a decades’ long global expenditure on climate change policies will fix the problem.
This insistence on blaming climate change achieves nothing and never will. The fact that climate is an intractable and incurable thing (possibly the reason that it is always the focus of this institution-led solution), ensures that real solutions to what are manageable problems may not be pursued – or even discussed.
As Michael Shellenberger reported from California, “The media blame climate change to divert attention from the incompetence of the politicians they like.”
The pattern that observers who follow these stories follows again and again notice is one where the media-driven narrative becomes ‘Climate Change’ and nothing more; then a couple of months later you find out from a court case or an obscure media report that an arsonist or arsonists was chiefly responsible for setting the blaze. By that time the whole news cycle has died down though and normal people don’t make the connection. The media has no real interest in updating them either.
This time there are a few differences though. The main areas hit by the fires in this devastating brush inferno contain the homes of influential opinion and policy setters in the left-wing dominated elite industries of LA and Hollywood. This has made real for them the consequences of societal dysfunction which have been ignored and valorised by the elites in California for decades.
California has serious problems.. Problems that are political, social, and ideological. This disaster has brought all of these festering social sores to the residents of the most expensive homes in California with devastating consequences.
The Paradise fires in 2018 killed 85 people – and there was evidence of many failings in the Californian civil system. These failings were not sufficiently learned from. Some argue that the same dreadful water management, forestry, and fire response failings are as manifest today as they were in 2018.
The fires raging around Hollywood as we speak started in the opulent coastal hills and ravaged the elite neighbourhood of Pacific Palisades. These coastal hills are very far from the typical fire zone, and the cause of the fire is not as evidently natural as the Santa Ana fires such as occurred in Paradise.
This time, there were immediate rumours of arson and videos surfacing of what appear to be deliberately set fires.
The truth of the matter is that many of the fires set in LA are set by the homeless, the NBC News reports. LA is too woke to tackle their homeless problem in any realistic way, so when these fires are set everybody just looks the other way. Here’s an example of a random fire being set.
Indeed, in news coming out of LA, a homeless man was arrested after starting fires with a blowtorch last week. Since then more arsonists have been apprehended setting fires.
In truth, because investigations are underway, officials can’t point definitively to the cause of the destructive blazes. But causes including “power lines, hikers, and arson” are being investigated – and reporters note that yellow police tape surrounds the path up to a popular trail in Temescal Canyon which is being described as a “crime scene”, to give just one example. Arson investigators are present at multiple sites, as the investigations continue. Penn State says that 84% of wildfires in the US are caused by human activities.
In Eaton, US Today reports: “Fire officials have not publicly identified the cause of the blaze. However, multiple lawsuits allege the fire was started by utility equipment owned by Southern California Edison, the largest power provider in Southern California.”
One of the lawsuits includes eyewitness accounts of a fire near one of the company’s utility towers. It also includes data that it says showed electrical grid disruptions occurred before the blaze started – which the company has disputed.
WATER MANAGEMENT – THE FIRE HYDRANTS RAN DRY
But fires, whether started naturally or by arsonists, are only one problem. The response to fires is perhaps the greater problem, and it is of course the one thing where a functioning state government could actually have an effect. The evidence indicates that the greater part of the catastrophe is caused by the state’s inability to respond in any effective way.
The evidence also indicates that this inability is the result of ideologically driven, dysfunctional policies. Policies which have meant that dead wood which is tinder for wild fires, is never cleared; the fire hydrants were empty when needed; and the fire fighting department didn’t have the people, the right people, or the resources needed to respond to fires.
The lack of basic competence in water management was responsible for empty fire hydrants when fire fighters started to put out fires.
Ironically when a local news personality tried to deny that there was a water problem and empty fire hydrants, their field reporter who they cut to immediately confirmed that there was no water.
Democratic California governor Gavin Newson acknowledged that the empty hydrants were a real issue: “The ongoing reports of the loss of water pressure to some local fire hydrants during the fires and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir are deeply troubling to me and to the community,” he said. “While water supplies from local fire hydrants are not designed to extinguish wildfires over large areas, losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors.”
This is not an oversight, its gross negligence, both in terms of the day to day running of the system where the hydrant basins were not filled, and in terms of the long range planning where new water collection systems are not being built.
In fact, Californian progressives blew up four dams on California’s Klamath river under the guise of returning tribal lands to their indigenous owners. Great news for the Shasta people perhaps, but not so great for the residents of the central valley or indeed coastal California.
Progressive policies have terrible consequences. California, under progressive ordinances has become an increasingly hazardous place. To take one example in environmental management; the regulation of the insurance industry, where state price controls prevented insurers from raising premiums to an operational level, combined with a policy of not removing dead brush, has meant that insurers have left the state.
Last year for instance, State Farm cancelled 1,600 policies in Pacific Palisades, a neighbourhood which is presently burning. State Farm’s risk assessment was of course absolutely accurate. The neighbourhood was a fire waiting to happen.
Controlled burns – burning dead brush in a controlled way so as to lessen fuel load in an area – isn’t practised in the region, in part because environmentalists argue native plants have difficulty recovering.
Crystal Kolden, an associate professor at the University of California Merced, “whose work focuses on understanding wildfire intersections with the human environment”, told HeatMap that “proper vegetation management could have greatly lessened the impact of the L.A. fires.”
She wrote on Bluesky, “These places will see fire again. I have no doubt. But I also know that you can rebuild and manage the land so that next time the houses won’t burn down. I’ve seen it work.”
CUTS TO FUNDING
Cuts to funding for the fire department meant that the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) chief, Kristin Crowley, warned state authorities a month ago “that a near $18 million budget cut had plunged it into “unprecedented operational challenges” which would hamper its ability to respond to large-scale emergencies like wildfires.”
“These budgetary reductions have adversely affected the department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as technology and communication infrastructure, payroll processing, training, fire prevention and community education,” Crowley wrote.
“The reduction in v-hours … has severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires, earthquakes, hazardous materials incidents and large public events,” Crowley wrote in the memo.
The fire chief said that staffing shortages and lack of resources had been a significant issue for her department for years.
“Since day one, we’ve identified huge gaps in regard to our service delivery and our ability of our firefighters’ boots on the ground to do their jobs since day one,” she said. “This is my third budget as we’re going into 2025-2026, and what I can tell you is we are still understaffed, we’re still under-resourced and we’re still underfunded.”
The decision to cut spending on the Fire Department was obviously a very expensive and stupid error.
Critics have accused the LA authorities of wasting money instead on “woke” campaigns and initiatives – the Midnight Stroll Transgender Café, as an example – but some of that criticism was also levelled at Crowley, as some felt her three year plan to increase diversity might have missed the point of the fire service.
This same woman announced that 70% of her hiring would be DEI hires, but it can be argued that a department that hires on ideological woke grounds is deliberately selecting against competence.
Those who managed to get through this filter against competence you then have to do the ritual humiliation of woke cultural sensitivity training as this video posted by the LAFD illustrates. LA County recently posted this video on how they make their firefighters train in cultural inclusivity, equity, diversity.
It might be desirable to make the hiring of tough adventurous men who live to take risks and could carry an injured person out of a building, a priority for a Fire Department. However, that is clearly not the priority of the LAFD who posted a video of a lesbian recruit who boasted that she would not be carrying some woman’s husband out of a burning building.
California prioritises progressive policies in their budget. In 2024 LA set aside $1.3Bn for the homeless industrial complex a lot more than they allocate to their fire department. When Rick Caruso ran for mayor of LA in 2022 he promised to restore the LAFD budget which had been cut in 2009 and never restored. Although Caruso spoke eminent sense and has shown competency throughout his career, he was deemed too white by progressive LA, who instead opted for a black woman, Karen Bass, who seems completely incompetent.
Bass, a committed Marxist who in her youth made regular pilgrimages to Cuba, flew off on a junket to Ghana even as she was getting warnings of Santa Ana winds of up to 100km/h. This was a time of extreme danger where the readiness of the National Guard would have been advisable.
The New York Post is now reporting that “a crisis response team reporting to LA Mayor Karen Bass – with hundreds of trained volunteers and a nearly million-dollar budget – languished on the sidelines for a week as the city endured its most devastating natural disaster ever.”
The embattled mayor’s apparent failure to quickly deploy these key support resources is the latest in a series of botched leadership decisions that has characterized her response to the Palisades Fire, which has killed nine people, wiped out thousands of homes and engulfed an area half the size of Brooklyn, New York.
The mayor’s office did not begin putting the volunteers to work helping fire victims until Tuesday — after The Post began asking questions about why its volunteers were idle.
That’s pretty inexplicable really.
The historian and Californian resident, Victor Davis Hanson, lists the litany of civil failures that combined to make this such disaster. The list is long. His analysis, though it will be disputed by some, is worth listening to.
All of these combined to create what Hanson describes as “a DEI, Green New Deal, Dante’s inferno, hydrogen bomb”
Bad as all this is, it’s only the half of it because on top of the inability to either plan for or respond to the fires, LA is being doubly hit by an opportunist who California’s open borders policies and LA’s easy on crime policies allowed to flourish. While people are fleeing from their homes in evacuation zones, organised gangs are rushing in for some high end looting.
One witness fleeing from her home with her family said that: “There were like 100 men arriving in cars and on scooters trying to get into the houses.”
As Cernovich writes “Los Angeles mayor is on vacation in Africa. Los Angeles Fire Department chief is a DEI advocate. Biden administration stopped doing controlled burns. The fire hydrants don’t have water. This is Democrat supermajority rule..”
Hollywood is burning, but long before these flames were set, the Californian political house was on fire.