Best of: The future of wildfire management

0:00Michael Wara:Hey everyone, it's Russ Altman, your host of The Future of Everything. I'm on vacation and therefore on location. You know, in the western United States and in Canada, it's starting to be peak fire season, and that's something that we can't ignore. For that reason, we're re-releasing a conversation I had with energy and climate policy expert Michael Wara. Michael takes us through how we got here, why fires are more frequent and bigger, and why new proactive approaches to landscaping in both urban and suburban areas might be a way to control the futures of wildfires. It's a great listen, and if you're living in a fire-prone area or if you're just worried about fires generally, we think this is worth another listen.

0:35Michael Wara:Ciao. Before we get started, a reminder to tell friends, neighbors, and colleagues all about the future of everything. We want to grow the show, and word of mouth is the best way to do it.

0:52Michael Wara:Well, we've all seen what wildfires can do. In the early parts of 2025, there was this terribly devastating fire in Los Angeles, destroying lots of the Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and other areas. But that wasn't the first. There had been a history of fires throughout California. There was a terrible fire in Napa Valley in 2017. And we've just been hearing more and more about wildfires. What's going on? Well, it turns out that there is a relationship between small changes in temperature and large changes in wildfire risk. In addition, it's straining the insurance industry. It's straining homeowners who want to be safe but don't have the knowledge or the resources to make things more safe.

1:33Michael Wara:And it's straining communities that are trying to make difficult decisions about how to spend their money to protect from wildfire while also addressing all the other needs of the community. Well, Michael Wara is a professor of law at Stanford University and an expert on wildfire, environmental science, climate, insurance, and all the issues that roll up in a discussion of wildfires. He's going to tell us that there is a big problem, but there are things, levers, that we can press and turn in order to improve the situation. Michael, how did you arrive at wildfires as a major focus of your work in law and the environment?

2:12Russell Roberts:Well, for about 20 years, I've been working on clean energy policy with a real focus in California. And about 10 years ago, people may remember that electric utilities started burning communities down. Not intentionally, but a little too frequently for comfort. And I was one of the people that immediately sort of maybe early recognized that this was a real threat to everything that we wanted to accomplish on climate in the state. And so started to get involved from that perspective. And the more you learn about it, the more you learn about wildfire, it's like an old sweater. You start pulling on it and it just comes apart and you can't really limit your, I guess you could, but I don't think it's the solutions.

3:06Russell Roberts:The real solutions are not limited to a single silo of thinking. And so started to spread out from there. It was on a wildfire commission that the state created back in 19 to try to solve some of the utility issues. But I came out of that even more concerned for the state. The more I learned about it, the more worried I've gotten. And the more I think that we need a kind of whole of society solution to this problem.

3:36Michael Wara:So it's funny. I'm glad you said that because one of the things that comes out in your writings is, of course, that this is multifactorial. And I would love to get to the utility companies, the insurance companies. But one of the things that a little bit surprised me was how central the community is, the community that's at risk of being destroyed. And it's all on our minds, not only because of what happened 10 years ago, but what happened several months ago in Los Angeles. So tell me about that community focus. And is that something that is fully appreciated? Is it activated at the level you would like to see?

4:10Michael Wara:And what are the opportunities there? I know that that's too many questions. So take whichever one of them you like.

4:15Russell Roberts:That is the challenge. If this were easy to do politically and socially, we would have solved the problem because there's been wildfire risk forever. Right. I'm old enough to remember the 91 Oakland Hills fire. One of my closest colleagues was a child and his family lost their home in that fire. And they moved to the South Bay from the East Bay as a result. So this is not new. What's changing is how often it happens. right you know we've gone from you know actually i remember talking to the senior insurance executives after 2017 which was you know the napa sonoma fires with bad fires in southern california that year too and they said well you know this happens once every 30 years nothing to get too upset about right we're gonna lose a lot of money and this time and then maybe we'll be fine for another 30 years but that's not what has happened and that means we need to think about the problem in a different way and address it with much greater urgency.

5:18Russell Roberts:And the real solutions are ones that start at the community level. They start at the house level. Like, how do you garden? What does your garden look like? What are the responsibilities that you have to maintain a safe home and garden? And what are the responsibilities of your neighbors? And how do we all agree on a different arrangement so that we can all be safe. And I think that is the fundamental challenge. And if it were easy, then we all would have done it a long time ago because we do easy things, but it's not easy. And so we're struggling.

5:53Michael Wara:Do communities generally embrace this challenge? Are people still in denial or thinking this is the state's problem? This is the federal problem. This is not our problem. Or have you seen that the communities, especially those at risk, And it's not that hard. I mean, sometimes there's a surprise fire. But in general, when there's a fire and you look at it, you know, you see wind situations, you see fuel situations where it looks like it probably could have been predicted. Are those communities in denial or do you see them activating?

6:22Russell Roberts:I think we're at a hinge point right now. But I would say we have done a lot of work. You look at the political response of the state over the last decade. Mostly, it has been to spend money on utilities, to stop utilities from starting fires. We've done okay on that. It's not perfect. We're hitting the limits of that strategy. And then we spent a lot of money as a state doing things outside of communities, right? Like burning, trying to do more prescribed fire to preserve landscapes, trying to, to the extent we're doing community stuff, it's like at the edge, right? Can we have a fuel break at the edge?

7:09Russell Roberts:Not can we do things house by house so that we don't have what happened in Altadena or Pacific Palisades play out. And I'll tell you, we knew what to do in 2017. Like if you went and talked to the insurance industry, if you went and like as soon as I started to sort of pull up the open the book on this, it was clear that there was a lot of science, but not a lot of willingness to implement. And it reminds me a lot of, you know, the speed limit on the highway is 65 miles an hour. But where I live, everybody drives 80. and it's not as if the CHP really have authority to pull over people if they're going 66 miles an hour, right?

7:57They might pull you over if you're going 75, but you have to be a little careful

8:01Russell Roberts:if you're going faster than 75. But there's not a political culture that supports the entities in government that might kind of enforce rules, enforcing the rules. If they try, they get fired. Yep.

8:17Michael Wara:Okay. So you said many things very interesting, but one of the things you said is that the science, even in 2017, was clear about what we could or slash need to do. So could you quickly review for me, what are the things that are kind of scientifically no-brainers, but that are not happening?

8:36Russell Roberts:So we learned in some fires in California in the early 2000s that we needed a building code that would prevent houses from catching on fire, reduce the chances of ignition of houses. We implemented that in 2008. And that building code is very effective. The problem is it's California. We have a housing crisis. We don't build a lot of houses. We have a lot of old houses. Well, they're not that old. But we have older homes mostly. And we build, you know, 100 ,000 new homes a year. We got 12 million existing homes. So you do the math on that and you realize pretty quickly that if we're not doing things to the existing homes, it's not going to solve the problem.

9:17Michael Wara:It's legacy risk that dominates. And, you know, that's reasonable in the sense that this risk is changing very fast because of climate change.

9:27Russell Roberts:It's one of the impacts from climate change that's changing the fastest. And it's changing much faster than temperature. And so it's understandable. Like we built an environment, we created communities and infrastructure when the risks were different. Now they have changed and we have to adjust. And the challenge is that fire is pushing us to adjust faster than society is normally prone to do. Yeah.

9:55Michael Wara:What about things like, so you mentioned the utilities. Should they be burying more lines? Does that work? Is that part of the science or is that just like an urban myth?

10:06Russell Roberts:Utilities have done a lot over the last decade. Like I sleep much better on a September, a windy, warm September evening than I did in 2018. Things are much safer, but there are limits to what utilities can do. And the limits really revolve around cost. In theory, we could underground everything. There are certain places with very new electric systems where, you know, and actually in California today, if you build a new master plan community, the electric system is underground. That's been true about the mid 1990s. But again, we have all these older communities. I live in a place where Mill Valley, where the streets were laid out in the 20s and 30s, and the electric system was built around that time.

10:51Russell Roberts:And it's kind of maintained in place. And undergrounding that electric system is incredibly expensive, more expensive than we can afford as a state. And it also takes a long time. And in the meantime, fires are happening, right? So there's a kind of how fast can we change and then what does it cost? And we have moved, we have been spending six, seven billion dollars a year making the electric system safer for the last, since 2017, really. And that has caused California's electricity rates to skyrocket to the point where affordability has become the central challenge for electricity. And there's a lot of people in California that can afford their electric rates.

11:35Russell Roberts:25 % of – I don't want to overstate. I think it's 20 % of customers, low-income customers in PG &E's service territory are in serious billerage. So like a fifth of the low-income population can't pay their electricity bill. Okay.

11:54Michael Wara:So that's huge because that then trickles down to limited resources for the electric company. They get stressed out in many senses of the word.

12:01Russell Roberts:And they're only allowed to charge so much, right? So if they want to raise their rates, they have to ask permission. And at this point, there is not permission because of these effects. And so, and I think it's, you know, sort of logically you think like, okay, the first few ignitions we avoid, those are going to be inexpensive. There's some stupid stuff that we were doing and got to stop doing the stupid stuff. And then we're going to get a little more clever and we're going to start doing the utilities in California to do some pretty high tech things to avoid ignitions at this point. Those things reduce the reliability of the system.

12:34Russell Roberts:So like the electric system switches off really quickly now. Tree brushes it. And that's good. So in LA, it's likely that one of the fires was caused by the electric system. But the kind of fire that we used to cause in the electric system is almost extinct. It used to be that the wires near your house would start fires, the distribution system. We had none of those fires in LA. Last two years, PG &E has caused no major fires from its distribution system. So we appear to have solved that problem or are getting close to solving it. And now we have this other challenge, which is the transmission system, which is maybe what caused the fire in Altadena.

13:23Michael Wara:Very, very interesting. Going back to the point about it's too expensive to bury things. Are there good algorithms, so to speak, for identifying the highest risk areas and saying, OK, if we only can spend this much, Here's the communities that have the highest risk. Is that something that's happening? Yeah, that is what's happening.

13:40Russell Roberts:And so we're burying, you know, there's sort of like a kind of how much can we afford to bury? And then let's risk target all that work. And that is something the utilities have been forced to do by their regulators. And at first it was they weren't so good at it, but they've gotten a lot better at it. And so that is the kind of thing that's happening in the electric system. By contrast, right, when we go back to, you know, what are the other things we're doing? There's not risk targeting happening across the state very much and not nearly the same level of sophistication on where do we invest in making communities safer?

14:16Russell Roberts:Should we go after the communities that are the highest risk and spend a bunch of state money to build fuel breaks around them? Or should we ask the homeowners because they're in these really high risk areas to do different things? That is not something we've done.

14:30Michael Wara:So that leads to questions about the insurance industries. You've mentioned them already and you've mentioned them as actually knowing quite a bit of things like they've studied this. They are in it all the way up to their necks. What is the situation with insurance? Those of us in California know that rates in certain areas are just going exponential. In some cases, people understand it. In fact, they say, I understand why my rates are so high. This is a risky area. But how are the insurance companies either contributing to the problem and or the solutions?

15:03Russell Roberts:Yeah. So I think insurance can be a signal, not a cause of the solution, right? It's going to tell you – insurance is a way for people to get information about where there is risk. But the reality is politically we're not going to let insurers charge enough to cause people to change their behavior. I suspect we won't. And there's a lot of history to suggest that that's true from the Southeast and the experience with hurricanes in the Southeast. The real estate market falls apart long before insurers are allowed to charge enough to fully reflect the risk. And therefore, the state governments step in to stop the real estate market from falling apart.

15:43Russell Roberts:Because if you can't sell property, governors don't have jobs anymore. Right. So so the insurance industry for a long time has been investing in modeling to estimate their risk, like not a shock. Right. They're the people ultimately that hold the bag when bad things happen. And so they want to know how much bag are they holding and how much do they charge for help? And those models, you know, those models, we were using them. I used them to develop this kind of special insurance policy for the electric utilities called the California Wildfire Fund back in 2019. And you know what jumped out of that modeling work?

16:26Russell Roberts:Pacific Palisades. That was the single largest financial exposure, the biggest risk for exactly this kind of fire, the kind of fire where it happens. It's basically over in a single night. And recognize there are fires, there are wildfires that happen in California that burn for months. You may remember the Dixie Fire, the Caldor Fire from a few years ago, or the Lightning Complex fires in 2020 when we were all locked down. That was just horrendous. those are like forest fires. The problem we have in California, the big problem we have in California, forest fires are a big problem. Don't get me wrong.

17:06If you want to go backpacking in the

17:08Russell Roberts:high Sierra and you care about walking in trees instead of a brush field, you should care about that.

17:13Michael Wara:And also your first comments were about air quality and that is huge volumes of pollution.

17:19Russell Roberts:Right. And I think all of us who do recreate in the Sierra have experienced the orange days being destroyed. Right. Like you can't you can't go on your backpacking trip because the air quality is so terrible. You'll have a heart attack and or get asthma. And so that's one problem. But there's another problem. And the other problem that the insurance industry really cares about is what happened in L.A., which is in January, which is what I think it's not. you would call it a wildfire, but in some ways that misrepresents what's going on. It's houses burning down, not trees. And those fires, if you go to Altadena or Pacific Palisades, if you're familiar with the area, you'll know that the ignition points of those fires were in the wild lands, but they were brush fires for about 10 minutes.

18:10Russell Roberts:And then maybe 10, 20 houses were ignited. And at that point, it's houses igniting houses. The fuel that's burning is houses and gardens, not wildlands. And so that's more akin to like what used to happen in the 19th century, like the Great Chicago Fire in 1870. Yeah. Yeah.

18:28Michael Wara:I was thinking about these in San Francisco after the earthquake.

18:31Russell Roberts:Yes, exactly. Fire, earthquake. Right. My great grandmothers had to live in Golgay Park after that one. And we figured out a way to solve those problems. We don't have those kinds of fires anymore because the urban environment has been engineered not to burn. And that is an important indicator of like the kinds of things we need to be thinking about, not necessarily fuel breaks, although those are not unimportant. Right. If you want to if you want to prevent the translation of a wildland fire into an urban fire, one way would be like have a have a moat around the community. That's kind of what a fuel break is.