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Notes -
Fires in California seem really bad - Mandate of Heaven in danger?
Let me just preface this in that I'm not American so I don't fully really appreciate what it's like over there or how systems are supposed to work. Anyway, when we have fires in Australia, it exclusively impacts rural areas right next to woodland. Rich people tend to live closer to the cities in inner suburbs, near the sea. It's unthinkable that a fire reaches them, it'd have to burn through huge swathes of suburban sprawl first. All that happens for most Australians (and especially rich Australians) is that air quality gets horrendously bad for two weeks. Of course the state still tries very hard to protect homes but it's very much a rural issue, the rural fire service goes out to volunteer and firefight.
I'm reading that in Los Angeles, it's the opposite. Rich people live on the edge of the city, right next to woodland. You've got expensive houses burning down.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg525q2ggl4o
There are pretty serious complaints about political neglect too. I hear that the mayor of LA was off in Ghana (which is frankly bizarre, this whole subnational diplomacy meme needs to be put down and buried in the backyard). I hear that the LA fire hydrants are somehow out of water in the Palisades. There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this. TBH fire-lighting seems like very low-risk, high-return terrorism, it's astonishing we haven't seen it become more common in certain vulnerable countries.
Naturally the first have turned into a political issue. Anti-Trump people have started blaming climate change and arguing that Trump wanted to cut fire defence spending.
Pro Trump people have pointed out that Trump was critical of California's water infrastructure before. And it's not as though California is known for being run by legions of Trump toadies: https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1877055198604017790
There also seems to be dysfunction in insurance, a very high number of fire insurance plans were cancelled right before the fire (possibly due to regulations preventing rate rises): https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1877128641802285064
IMO the solution is intensive backburning when it's cool. There can be no fires if you destroy the fuel beforehand.
However, it does seem like a major failure in state legitimacy if you can't even protect the rich from fires. From Chris Bakke on twitter:
Thoughts? I don't really have a thesis here.
Unlikely. There were 80 mph (120 kph) winds before the fires started, but it was dry for many weeks beforehand without incident, which suggests to me that winds blew down power lines (or equivalently, branches next to power lines), and sparks from shorting cables are enough to get dry brush started.
Humans naturally have a tendency to search for intention in chance events, but here rumors of bad actors deflect blame from the likely cause: mismanagement on the part of PG&E and the local forest/parks service, so I expect those rumors to be encouraged in the media.
I also see people reaching for the Global Warming explanation, but to me this is a series of proximate systemic failures in administration and in holding individuals/companies accountable. Which just about captures half my complaints about the state of American governance: too much consensus-building, not enough action or taking accountability. Definitely a loss of Mandate of Heaven moment.
I mean, might homeless people have set fires? They’ve been known to do that when it’s cold.
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