The rich and famous of Southern California have always loved living in isolated spots with gorgeous mountain views, and it has always been a bad idea

 We'll be coming back to this excellent story from the LA Times on the history of catastrophic fires in the region and how we keep ignoring the lessons we ought to be learning from them.

‘Built to burn.’ L.A. let hillside homes multiply without learning from past mistakes by Jenny Jarvie

On a hot, dry November morning in 1961, flames from a trash pile on brushland north of Mulholland Drive were picked up by Santa Ana winds and swept across the canyons of one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest enclaves.

The apocalyptic scenes that played out — of Hollywood celebrities fleeing and clambering onto their roofs — captured the world’s attention like no urban conflagration in history. Actor Kim Novak and Richard Nixon, then a former vice president who moved to L.A. to practice law, wielded garden hoses to soak their wooden roof shingles. Actor Fred MacMurray enlisted studio workers from the set of “My Three Sons” to evacuate his family and help firefighters cut down brush around his Brentwood home.

When the blaze reached the mansions of Bel-Air, thermal heat lifted burning shingles high into the air and 50-mph winds hurled them more than a mile over to Brentwood. By nightfall, the Bel-Air fire had destroyed 484 homes, including those of actor Burt Lancaster, comedian Joe E. Brown and Nobel laureate chemist Willard Libby. 

After firefighters extinguished the flames, socialite and actor Zsa Zsa Gabor, wearing white kitten heels and a string of pearls as she clutched a shovel, dug through the rubble of her Bellagio Place home for a safe with jewels.

The Bel-Air fire became known as the “the big one,” the event that forced everyone in Los Angeles to reckon with the dangers fire posed to their coveted hillsides.

In response, L.A. officials ushered in new fire safety measures, investing in more firefighting helicopters, new fire stations and a new reservoir. They also outlawed untreated wood shingles in high-fire-risk areas and initiated a brush clearance program to create defensible space around homes.

But they did not stop building on fire-prone ridges and canyons.

And there was no major push to radically rethink how they built. Over the next half a century, new housing tracts filled the wildland interface. And a succession of larger and more deadly fires swept through the region. But all the safety improvements prompted by the Bel-Air and subsequent fires could not outpace the escalating threat from new development and climate change.

The massive blazes that engulfed Los Angeles hillsides communities Jan. 7, destroying 16,000 structures and killing at least 29 people in and around Pacific Palisades and Altadena, have prompted a new reckoning on how so many L.A. homes came to be built on land so vulnerable to fire and how, or whether, they should be rebuilt.

It’s a crossroads the region has found itself at before when the power of fire left us reeling.

“California is built to burn — it’s not unique in that — but it’s built to burn on a large scale and explosively at times,” said Stephen Pyne, a fire historian and professor emeritus at Arizona State University.

“You can live in that landscape, but how you choose to live will affect whether that fire is something that just passes through like a big thunderstorm, or whether it is something that destroys whatever you’ve got.”

 

F&A costs and why they matter

This is Joseph.

So on Friday afternoon this new policy dropped, to take effect Monday morning. Like many things in the new world, the lack of any delay before implementation creates an immediate sense of crisis. It seems almost naive to think back to the days where the Administrative Procedures Act was applied to major new changes. 

Now what this new policy means is a little complex. When the US government funds research, they attach the costs for facilities and administration as a negotiated percentage of every dollar of direct costs. This is a strange way to pay for enforcing federal regulations and building electricity, but it has the advantage of being both simple and easy to administer. It causes some oddness -- grants focusing on data analysis don't require animal research ethics infrastructure and so averaging these expenses across all grants can lead to some hard to explain corner cases (in both directions as the F&A costs on a primate center may seem shockingly low). 

So the real impact of this measure is a large and profound cut to the universities that host research activities. So some of this might return in increased numbers of awards. I might not be surprised if there was a spike on off-campus research given the odd decision to make the level uniform and international institutions will be quite happy with the doubling of the current 8% F&A rate for international awards. The comparison to the much smaller foundation grants is also challenging, as very small amounts of funding can have less generous F&A terms so long as the funding is a small piece of a greater whole and there is no comparison of allowable expenses and/or regulations to be followed (which can make a large difference). 

There is a lot of confusion as to whether this is a change that can be done via executive order. But the bottom line is that it is a large and immediate cut to institutes of higher education intended to maximize pain by eliminating the money with flexibility. Is it possible that the current F&A is excessive for at least one institution of higher education, somewhere in the United States? Sure, in some case or at some margins it is likely as the NIH is a big place. Is an immediate cut from ~60% to 15% (all at once without warning) a good policy? No. No it is not. 

"Sadly ecstatic disaster porn, with superficial coverage of causes and no interest whatsoever in solutions"

 Another more-relevant-than-when-we-ran-it post.

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Why do serious journalists keep talking about good fires?

Because they work.

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — Last year and the year before, in an unprecedented environmental disaster, wildfires in California’s Sequoia National Park and nearby national forests roared through treasured sequoia groves in the Southern Sierra Nevada, generating flames hundreds of feet high and killing nearly 20% of all the giant sequoia trees left in the world.

But the Washburn fire burning now in Yosemite National Park, licking around the edges of the roughly 500 giant sequoias in Mariposa Grove — some over 200 feet tall and more than 2,000 years old  — so far hasn’t killed a single one of the massive old-growth trees there.

A big part of the reason, experts say, is that park officials completed 23 projects at the grove since 1971 to thin brush and set controlled burns to remove dead wood and vegetation that had built up over more than century of fire suppression.

That left less dead material on the forest floor, and fewer shrubs and small trees like firs that can make fires burn hotter. As a result, the forest was restored to a more natural condition, experts say, similar to the way it would have looked centuries ago when lightning strikes and burning from native tribes sent low-impact fires through the Sierra every 10 years or so.

With a few notable exceptions (ProPublica, Reveal, Marketplace, NPR), the national coverage of the California wildfires has been, terrible. Sadly ecstatic disaster porn, with superficial coverage of causes and no interest whatsoever in solutions, which is especially unforgivable because this is one of the few crises where we know what we need to do.

Liz Weil from her definitive ProPublica piece on the subject:

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

The best graphic I've seen on the wildfire crisis comes from National Public Radio, which just seems wrong

It's like when you learn that one of the biggest stars of the golden age of radio was a ventriloquist. 

This All Things Considered story was part of a superb series on the rise of Western mega-fires and the pictures below do a great job driving home the central point of this discussion, a point which is straightforward and is agreed upon by all the experts and yet which still manages to evade most of the journalists covering this issue. 

Good

Bad

The wildfire crisis is not that we are having too many fires -- we're actually having too few -- but that we're having too many bad fires and not enough good ones. The lack of the latter is the primary cause for the growing frequency of the former.

Barring imminent loss of life, our policy should be to do everything we can to promote conditions for good fires then let them burn. That has always been a difficult call, but building more houses in these areas makes it much harder. This doesn't mean we should or even can stop building in wildland-urban interfaces, but it mean we have to get serious about where we prioritize development.

Some relevant background on Musk and Twitter

Picking up from Joseph's post last week.

 As previously mentioned, no journalist has risen to the moment of the second Trump term like Josh Marshall. His take on the ramifications of Elon Musk's role as de facto co-president has been particularly sharp.

From Talking Point Memo:

This is a paywalled article at Wired. But it makes a pretty good case that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is now basically being run at its highest levels by people installed by and working with Elon Musk. In other words, “DOGE” seems to be calling the shots at OPM, even though it’s run by people who aren’t even federal employees. Most of these people appear to come from Musk’s various companies. Wired declined to publish the names of two of the people because of their age. One graduated from high school last summer.

Some of this is already known. The nominee to run the agency, Scott Kupor, is a partner at the Andreessen/Horowitz VC firm. They’re aligned with Musk politically. So that’s consistent with the rest of the story. But it seems the upper echelons of the agency has already been stocked with a mix of Musk’s people and Republican operatives, notwithstanding the fact that this is a federal agency which is usually made up almost entirely of career staff.

This afternoon OPM sent out an email to civilian government employees offering them “buy outs” if they resigned from their jobs in the next 10 days (by February 6th). This has been reported by the Post and I’ve also received copies of the email directly sent to me by TPM Readers. (If you’re a federal employee: send me all the information/documents you have. We can also arrange to communicate through an encrypted channel.) The legal basis of these “buy outs” is dubious at best – though we need to learn more about that. It also seems highly questionable under what authorization the administration is dramatically trimming the entire federal workforce without any congressional authority. That said, the spending freeze already takes the administration fairly brazenly outside of its constitutional authority. But the whole picture comes into clearly view if this is being run and planned by people reporting to Elon Musk. This is essentially what he did when he took over Twitter.

 In many ways, Twitter was the first major company that Elon Musk actually ran. He did start and manage a couple of abortive attempts during the dot-com boom. The first was one of those non-entities that got absorbed by deep-pocketed players. The second was an ill-conceived online bank (the original X) that was fortunate enough to merge with the company that had just developed PayPal. The combined company went through several rapid leadership changes, with Musk briefly at the top, but you can’t say he truly ran the it.

He used the windfall from the sale of PayPal along with funding from other investors to establish SpaceX, but the people actually in charge were highly respected aerospace veterans. They sometimes let the money guy wear an engineer’s cap and blow the whistle, but no one, including Musk himself, really thought he was running the train.

It is important to remember that SpaceX is over 20 years old, and the man who founded it was only starting to become the Elon Musk of today, only beginning to get a taste of unprecedented fame and hype that he would increasingly come to buy into over the next couple of decades.

While Tesla does give us a sense of the man's management style, it’s still Musk with guardrails. With the takeover of the company, prompted initially by resentment over the praise and attention being lavished on one of the actual founders, Elon did expect to be in charge. However, the management structure quickly evolved to limit the damage he could do, up to and including his direct reports telling employees how to maneuver around the office without walking past the CEO in case he was in a mood to randomly fire people.

Twitter is the first time we got a chance to see how a fully formed Elon Musk, unconstrained and unwilling to compromise, would run a multi-billion dollar company. It's not surprising that DOGE should follow the same playbook.

And there's no reason to expect the outcome to be any better.

p.s. To get an idea just how badly the current combination of inexperience and incompetence may play out, take a look at this follow-up from Marshall: Musk Cronies Dive Into Treasury Dept Payments Code Base (this one's really bad).

Criminalizing solutions -- an extreme but informative case

 We talked about this when it happened back in 2022, but the story has only grown more relevant.

 Forest Service employee's arrest after fire crosses onto private land sparks larger debate
TONY CHIOTTI Blue Mountain Eagle

When Rick Snodgrass approached Grant County Sheriff Todd McKinley, he thought the sheriff was there to help him.

According to Snodgrass, he’d called for law enforcement to help control aggressive traffic and to deal with harassment his crews had been receiving while implementing a prescribed burn on the Malheur National Forest in Bear Valley, about 7 miles north of Seneca.

That burn — called the Starr 6 — had since jumped the fireline, and now there was active fire on both sides of County Road 63, where Snodgrass and McKinley met: the prescribed burn operation on Malheur National Forest land to the north of the road — now flaring up in gusts of wind — and an uncontained slopover on private land to the south. The crews under Snodgrass’ direction were now attempting to quell one fire while holding the reins on another, with tempers, smoke, wind and now traffic adding to the dangers to his crew.

But instead of assistance, what Snodgrass got was arrested.

When the sheriff cuffed Snodgrass, it is thought to be the first time a U.S. Forest Service firefighter has been arrested in the course of performing their job.

Snodgrass, the “burn boss” on the day’s operation, was taken away from the scene and charged with reckless burning, a Class A misdemeanor that carries a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a $6,250 fine. Before it was contained, an hour after it kicked off, the spot fire burned an estimated 20 to 40 acres of private land owned by members of the Holliday family.

 ...

“I think in a lot of parts of Oregon, it’s just a very real experience for federal employees to have a lot of hostility towards what they’re doing right now,” said Christopher Adlam, a regional fire specialist for Oregon State University’s Extension Service. “I’m not saying that people don’t also appreciate firefighters and thank firefighters. But it’s a pretty common thing in some parts of Oregon for federal employees to face hostility.”

...

If you use the phrase “controlled burn” in the vicinity of firefighters operating a prescribed burn, you will be corrected.

This is fire. You don’t control it. The best you can plan for is to manage it and be prepared if the fire has other ideas.

Adlam points out that spillover fires like the one that happened in Bear Valley are rare occurrences but can still have a huge impact on people. “I think that, the last 20 years, we’ve had one other occurrence of a burn crossing over from federal land onto private land in Oregon,” he said.

The Malheur National Forest supervisor notes that the spillover was quickly brought under control.

Not only was this a horrible precedent, it also made the situation far more dangerous.

It has also stirred the ire of wildland firefighter communities, who fear this development will set a precedent and only complicate an already difficult and dangerous job. And in these groups’ online conversations, it is clear many believe that the arrest created a situation on the ground that may have added to the real risk faced by fire crews in Bear Valley.

“One of the huge watch-out situations in any fire operation is a transition in leadership,” said Trulock. “And that’s when it’s a plan to transition in leadership. This was obviously unplanned. What I would say is there were definite heightened risks because of that action. Until leadership can be reestablished under a new person, then everybody is distracted because they know something happened. And so it created a huge distraction in the middle of what I would consider is a relatively high-risk operation.”

Adlam, the Extension Service fire specialist, agreed.

“The burn boss’s role is never more important than at the moment where something happens that is not part of the plan,” he said. “If you cut off the head of an operation before it’s finished, how is that supposed to be leading to a positive outcome?”

For no particular reason, I felt like reading up on the Smoot–Hawley Tariff today

From Wikipedia:

The Tariff Act of 1930 (codified at 19 U.S.C. ch. 4), commonly known as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff or Hawley–Smoot Tariff,^[1] was a law that implemented protectionist trade policies in the United States. Sponsored by Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley, it was signed by President Herbert Hoover on June 17, 1930. The act raised US tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods.^[2]

The tariffs under the act, excluding duty-free imports, were the second highest in United States history, exceeded by only the Tariff of 1828.^[3] The Act prompted retaliatory tariffs by many other countries.^[4] The Act and tariffs imposed by America's trading partners in retaliation were major factors of the reduction of American exports and imports by 67% during the Great Depression.^[5] Economists and economic historians have agreed that the passage of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff worsened the effects of the Great Depression.

 

"You say you want a revolution" repost -- I missed one

 This definitely should have made the list:

Johnnie Tallent is a callous young mod who lives with his elderly, invalid grandmother, Alice. Lazy and unmotivated, Johnnie dedicates most of his time to taking care of Alice to remain in her good graces so that he can inherit her small fortune and valuable house after she dies. He spends what free time he has with his girlfriend Jill Standish, an even more callous travel agent.

Jill encourages Johnnie to take active measures to accelerate his grandmother's death, so that the two of them can get married and retire on Alice's fortune. Together, the two concoct a plan to induce a heart attack in Alice by gaslighting her, effectively murdering her yet leaving no evidence of the crime. To this end, Johnnie slowly begins convincing Alice that London's twenty-somethings, feeling that the elderly have become a drain on society, are planning a youth revolution, with the goal of either killing the elderly or placing them in internment camps. Johnnie manipulates Alice's access to newspapers and television, using stories and footage of protests to further convince her that the youth revolution is growing and becoming progressively more violent.

To further enhance his story, Johnnie and Jill cover the wall outside Alice's bedroom window with ageist graffiti. After several weeks, Alice grows paranoid and reclusive, and her health seriously deteriorates. Finally, Jill uses her position at the travel agency to schedule a large parade to pass by Alice's house one afternoon; that morning, Johnnie tells her that the revolution has begun, and that rioters are going door-to-door looking for elderly people to kill or intern. When the parade arrives, Alice, already in a panic, suffers a heart attack. Johnnie allows her to die before calling an ambulance.

 

 

 

Monday, March 7, 2022

"You say you want a revolution"

This was going to be part of an upcoming post but I decided it worked better freestanding. 

Back in the late sixties there was a surprising popular genre of apocalyptic dystopias inspired by fears of the youth movement. Countless examples in episodic television (three or four from Star Trek alone). The 1967 novel Logan’s Run (but not the 1976 movie which dropped the political aspects of the story). Arguably films If and Clockwork Orange (though in this case, not the book, which is more a part of the post-war panic over juvenile delinquency). Corman’s Gas-s-s-s. Certainly others I’m forgetting. 

Though not the best in the bunch, the most representative was Wild in the Streets.

Wild in the Streets figures prominently in Pauline Kael's essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies": [emphasis added]

There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art. The Scalphunters, for example, was one of the few entertaining American movies this past year, but skillful though it was, one could hardly call it a work of art — if such terms are to have any useful meaning. Or, to take a really gross example, a movie that is as crudely made as Wild in the Streets — slammed together with spit and hysteria and opportunism — can nevertheless be enjoyable, though it is almost a classic example of an unartistic movie. What makes these movies — that are not works of art — enjoyable? The Scalphunters was more entertaining than most Westerns largely because Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis were peculiarly funny together; part of the pleasure of the movie was trying to figure out what made them so funny. Burt Lancaster is an odd kind of comedian: what’s distinctive about him is that his comedy seems to come out of his physicality. In serious roles an undistinguished and too obviously hard-working actor, he has an apparently effortless flair for comedy and nothing is more infectious than an actor who can relax in front of the camera as if he were having a good time. (George Segal sometimes seems to have this gift of a wonderful amiability, and Brigitte Bardot was radiant with it in Viva Maria!) Somehow the alchemy of personality in the pairing of Lancaster and Ossie Davis — another powerfully funny actor of tremendous physical presence — worked, and the director Sydney Pollack kept tight control so that it wasn’t overdone.

And Wild in the Streets? It’s a blatantly crummy-looking picture, but that somehow works for it instead of against it because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t. It looks like other recent products from American International Pictures but it’s as if one were reading a comic strip that looked just like the strip of the day before, and yet on this new one there are surprising expressions on the faces and some of the balloons are really witty. There’s not a trace of sensitivity in the drawing or in the ideas, and there’s something rather specially funny about wit without any grace at all; it can be enjoyed in a particularly crude way — as Pop wit. The basic idea is corny — It Can’t Happen Here with the freaked-out young as a new breed of fascists — but it’s treated in the paranoid style of editorials about youth (it even begins by blaming everything on the parents). And a cheap idea that is this current and widespread has an almost lunatic charm, a nightmare gaiety. There’s a relish that people have for the idea of drug-taking kids as monsters threatening them — the daily papers merging into Village of the Damned. Tapping and exploiting this kind of hysteria for a satirical fantasy, the writer Robert Thom has used what is available and obvious but he’s done it with just enough mockery and style to make it funny. He throws in touches of characterization and occasional lines that are not there just to further the plot, and these throwaways make odd connections so that the movie becomes almost frolicsome in its paranoia (and in its delight in its own cleverness).

It's easy to be dismissive of these fears fifty plus years later, but the revolutionary rhetoric of the movement was often extreme and was punctuated by the occasional bombing, bank robbery, etc.

But probably the biggest mistake people made when predicting the impact of the sixties youth movement was taking them at their word, believing that their commitment to radicalism (or even liberalism) would outlast the end of the Vietnam War. The post-war generation would change the country, but I doubt anyone in 1969 would have guessed how. 

 

I promised we'd get back to the goats.

Let's be honest. The main reason I'm posting this is because it's a fun story and we don't get many of those in the wildfire thread. That said, this NPR piece (part of their excellent reporting on Western wildfires) does hit on some important ongoing issues with the larger story.

Class. 

As with the housing debate, everything you read about California fires has an essential economic subtext. These goats can do wonderful things for the land around your community, not just reducing the risk of fire, but removing some of the nastiest plants imaginable, but you'll notice that it is the wealthier neighborhoods that can and do take advantage of this. A similar issue came up recently in Pacific Palisades where wealthy poverty owners brought in private firefighters help save their homes and businesses.

 

Scalability. 

A few months ago I was having lunch with an engineering professor and the conversation turned to the possibility of using biochar to dispose of forest waste. On the surface, it would seem to be a wonderful idea. You not only get rid of fuel for future wildfires; you also, in effect, remove carbon from the atmosphere and put it in a stable form where it can stay for hundreds of years, but try as we might, neither of us could see anyway to scale the process up to the massive levels we would need to make a dent in the problem in the immediate future.

Tools like grazing or mechanical clearing are very probably more scalable than biochar – – controlled burns almost certainly are – – but we are talking about millions upon millions of acres and as far as I can tell the only solution that can be applied at that level is simply letting more fires burn whenever possible.

 

Indifference (and in some cases, open hostility) toward solutions. 

Though we probably can't clear out more than a fraction of the tinder that has built up in these forests over the past one hundred plus years, these goats provide us with a wonderful tool, particularly in and around wildland urban interfaces, with virtually no real downsides. Why aren't we moving forward on this as aggressively as possible and putting some real money behind it?


In California, wildfires are prevented by crews of unlikely firefighters: goats
August 10, 20235:00 AM ET
Vanessa Romo
 

The end of a quiet residential street in Glendale, Calif., is just one of many battlegrounds in the state's annual fight against wildfire season. And it's being waged by goats.

About 300 of them are spread out along the foothills and steep ridges of the Verdugo Mountains, which loom over multi-million dollar homes at the end of a cul de sac. The goats are busy chomping away on the dried-out vegetation that's exploded after this year's drought-busting rains.

Seemingly oblivious to the 94 F heat, the animals are hard at work devouring several acres of dead, yellowed grasses, scrubby bushes and cactus, as well as some of Southern California's most invasive plants, including star thistle and black mustard.

...

Even after more than a decade in the business, [Michael Choi, the owner of Fire Grazers Inc.] is still confounded by how the goats make such easy work of an array of prickly and painful plants.

"It's mind boggling that they'll even eat star thistle, considering it's so painful to grab," he said. "It's invasive. It just spreads everywhere. And if you try to weed whack it, you wind up getting poked in the face and then all over the body. But goats will come up to that and they'll just eat it up because it tastes good to them."

Choi's company is busier than ever this year after the drought-breaking rains of this past winter. The downpour led to more growth, which has led to greater demand. That, Choi said, has extended his season by a couple of months, from March through what potentially could be the early weeks of October.

...

And in a few hours, Choi will be transporting the group to their next job in Rancho Palos Verdes, another wealthy enclave surrounded by tough-to-climb terrain. It's one of about five sites the company has going. So far, Fire Grazers Inc. has been contracted by the cities of Torrance, Hidden Hills, Westlake Village, Orange County and even private homeowners with sprawling estates in Beverly Hills and Calabasas.

...

If it were up to [Patty Mundo, vegetation management inspector for the Glendale Fire Department], she'd lease the herd for a much longer stretch, she said. The city owns about 500 parcels of land, and with the budget that's allocated to fire prevention — $62,000, plus another $14,000 specifically for the goats — they can only afford to clear a fraction of it every year.

...

As it stands, Mundo said the goats have saved the city precious financial resources. Brush crews are far more expensive because they rely on power tools, which need fuel. "They have to use heavy equipment like chippers. And sometimes they have to take the vegetation to a landfill. So that's just an added cost," she said. There are also additional fees to remove poison oak, which is common in the Verdugo Mountains.

In contrast, all the goats need is water, mineral and salt blocks, and a large Anatolian shepherd dog to ward off coyotes. They can also climb up steep mountainsides, eat the poison oak and work under the blazing sun without suffering from heat stress or heat exhaustion.

...

Lynn Huntsinger, a professor of rangeland ecology and management at the University of California, Berkeley, noted targeted grazing works best when it's used in combination with other wildfire reduction measures, especially prescribed burning.

"In an ideal world, we would have used goats or sheep or even cows, after the big fires we've had in recent years," Huntsinger told NPR.

That would have had the greatest impact in eliminating noxious and invasive plants, because the animals would consume any regrowth of the unwanted vegetation, she explained.

And even in places where there has not been a fire, regular grazing routines over time can eventually exhaust the root stock, preventing them from resurfacing and permanently changing the biomass of the space. That's for the better, according to Huntsinger.

A bit of a brisk start to the new administration

This is Joseph.

Well, this news has caused no end of concern today. I am not sure exactly what is happening and it seems like everybody is guessing. That seems to be a common theme this week. 

The good news is that it seems Elon Musk is getting ready to rescue us. It fills one with confidence when news media has these issues with reporting the names of office holder in important public positions of responsibility:

Wired declined to publish the names of two of the people because of their age. One graduated from high school last summer.

The good news is that this might be the end of the gerontocracy. The bad news is that it might be a bit longer than usual before we get a sense of what is happening. But, one way or the other, I think it definitely isn't great for morale among people who rely on government programs. 

We are also seeing the Twitter playbook being repeated for staff:

So at least Mr. Musk has experience with implementing this type of human resources strategy in a large and complex organization. I will leave it to Mark to opine on how likely that is to help, as Elon Musk is more his wheelhouse than mine. 

We'll come back to the Goat Fund Me proposal later

As we have mentioned before, the reporting of NPR along with Propublica, Reveal, and Marketplace looks really good in retrospect. Perceptive, prescient, nuanced. This 2019 piece is if anything more relevant now than it was in the aftermath of the Camp Fire. It also presents a strong counterargument to the party line of the New York Times et al with respect to developing areas such as La Cañada Flintridge.

Dan Efseaff, the parks and recreation director for the devastated town of Paradise, Calif., looks out over Little Feather River Canyon in Butte County. The Camp Fire raced up this canyon like a blowtorch in a paper funnel on its way to Paradise, incinerating most everything in its path, including scores of homes.

Efseaff is floating an idea that some may think radical: paying people not to rebuild in this slice of canyon: "The whole community needs some defensible space," he says.

Residents would get expanded green space for recreation and a vital safety buffer to help protect Paradise from future fire calamities. "We would work with either landowners on easements," he suggests, "or looking at them from a standpoint of some purchases in here."

...

Encouraging people to have an evacuation plan and create a 100-foot buffer of "defensible space" around their home — what firefighters have traditionally called basic wildfire preparation — are definitely important, [retired Cal Fire director Ken] Pimlott says.

But it's not enough. He would like to see the Paradise tragedy spur broader discussions about where people can safely live.

"Certainly I'm not advocating a ban on building in the urban interface. I think that obviously people are going to move and [there's] landowner rights, all of that," he says. "But at the end of the day we need to be looking at every development at every home and seeing if we can mitigate all aspects of [wildfire] before we build. And if we can't, then maybe we have to make a decision that that's not the right place."

Rain

 We finally got our first real storm of the winter. Nothing torrential but a good steady rain stretched out over a couple of days. The snow level dropped down to 3,000 feet which covers a little bit of the city and a significant chunk of the county. To the east, some of the mountains got more than a foot. To the North, Interstate 5 is closed due to snow at the Grapevine.

At this point, I am supposed to focus on the negative, pointing out the dangers of landslides, flash floods, toxic ash, wet or icy roads, and making sure that everyone knows that this doesn't come anywhere near to catching us up for the "rainy" season. All of this is true, but this compulsion to spin what is overall very good news as bad is neither healthy nor informative.

First off, beyond the fact that we desperately need the rain, this gives us all some breathing room before the next wildfire. Even after Eaton, Palisades, and Hughes were mostly contained, we were still in a very dangerous position. The Santa Anas were still blowing and we were one bad wind away from seeing recent events repeat themselves in places like La Cañada Flintridge or the Hollywood Hills.

Given the terrain and the seasonality of the weather, the people who lived here have always had to deal with floods and landslides going back thousands of years. The altitude of the city of Los Angeles ranges from zero to over 5,000 feet. In the county, it's more than 10,000. All that water rushing to the ocean will do some damage. Fortunately, the fire departments of Southern California have some of the best rescue units in the world and most people around here understand the risks.

While looking on the bright side, we should also note that unlike some previous years, this dry spell is limited to our part of the state. Northern California is having a pretty good year. This takes some of the pressure off of the state's firefighting resources.

This was a good weekend.

Getting your takes on California from publications with "New York" in their name may not be the smartest play

The following comment is from David Wallace-Wells. It is part of a conversation he had with Jared Diamond in 2019 published in New York magazine. If anything is more relevant now than it was then.

I’m a native New Yorker and lived my whole life in this environment on the East Coast. And when I see images of those wildfires and when I hear stories of people I know or people I meet, and the fact that they’ve evacuated, the fact that no matter where you are in Southern California, also in parts of Central California and Northern California, you have an evacuation plan in mind. I just don’t understand how you guys can live like that. It must begin to impose some kind of psychic cost.

Diamond does a reasonably good job parrying the silliness, pointing out that it was the psychic costs of dealing with New England blizzards that convinced him to move to Southern California, but he is far too polite to come out and say just how wrong Wallace-Wells gets this.

Though the situation is very different when it comes to earthquakes, the majority of Angelenos do not have and do not need any kind of wildfire evacuation plan. There are obviously exceptions. If you live somewhere like Topanga or have a house in the Hollywood Hills, you very much do need to know in advance what your options are for getting out of harm's way. If you live in or near the foothills, it's a good idea. But most of us do not live in or even adjacent to wildland-urban interfaces. We do need to have plans in place for how to deal with the possibility of heavy smoke or power outages, and when we travel in the state, it's a good idea to check on fire conditions, particularly in the national forests. This is a huge problem and no one in the state or in any mountainous regions of the West can entirely avoid its impact, but most of us are under no real danger of losing our house to a wildfire.

Too much of the national narrative about LA and California in general either originates with or is interpreted by people with no real knowledge of the place. This is always a bad way to approach reporting about an area, but when you're talking about something as big, varied, and complex as this, rampant misinformation is as inevitable as forest fires.

This isn't the first time we've had an issue with Wallace-Wells' reporting.

NYT's cigarettes and cocaine reporting on the LA fires

Here's how we defined a cigarettes and cocaine argument back in 2020:

The basic form goes something like this:

    Our household spending is out of control.

    Between your cigarettes and my cocaine habit, we're spending hundreds of dollars a week.

    You definitely need to cut back on your cigarettes.

The key to the approach is to take two things, related but of wildly different magnitudes, and conveniently aggregate then disaggregate them to reach the desired conclusion.

For years (post Reagan and pre-Obamacare), pundits and politicians pushing for entitlement reform relied largely, perhaps primarily on C and C arguments. Dire projections for the combined finances of Social Security and Medicare were presented to justify severe and immediate cuts in Social Security. Of course, the horrifying shortfalls were coming from the Medicare side of the ledger, but that pea was inevitably lost among the shells.

 

 The generalized form of the argument goes like this:

1. Claim about A, usually negative (A is dangerous/costly/unsustainable);

2. Supporting evidence about A and B where B is the source of most of the problems (more expensive, causing more deaths, trending in a worse direction, etc.);

3. More arguments against A.

While the classic C&C example is Social Security and Medicare, another reliable source is LA city and LA county. Countless articles and op-eds about the failings of the city and its government will throw in county-wide statistics to make their case. (Keep in mind less than half Angelenos live in the city).

The NYT is a longtime offender on this front and their coverage of the recent fires does not disappoint.

From Los Angeles Fire Chief Faces Calls for Resignation

Now, as Los Angeles reels under an extended onslaught of wind-driven wildfire, its fire chief is being buffeted by challenges in and outside her ranks, tension with City Hall and questions about her department’s preparedness. The fires, which are still unfolding on the city’s west side and in the community of Altadena outside the city, have so far leveled nearly 40,000 acres and claimed at least 27 lives.

Pay close attention to that number of fatalities. 

Southern California is looking at an extraordinary dry spell with almost no precipitation for eight or so months, well into what is supposed to be the rainy season. Under these conditions, the huge windstorm of a couple of weeks ago was unsurprisingly followed by a number of fires, two of which became major, Eaton and Palisades. Eaton was located in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County north of Pasadena, making it the responsibility of the county government. The Eaton Fire was significantly more deadly with a toll of 17 out now 28 deaths. 

Interestingly, there has been virtually no criticism of the county fire chief, certainly not a wave of calls for his dismissal. 

There do appear to have been some instances where the response to the fires in the city was mishandled, but as we have said before, the blame for these disasters lies almost entirely in decisions made outside of the mayor's office. The current narrative is a costly distraction, driven by regional ignorance, political agendas (Murdoch organizations have been pushing it heavily), and a juvenile fascination with the travails of wealthy celebrities.

Given recent history, the New York Times meekly going along with Fox News/NY Post spin is hardly out of character and, of course, identifying with the rich and powerful is practically in the paper's DNA.

Birthright citizenship

This is Joseph

There was a recent executive order seeking to limit some classes of birthright citizenship going forward. It seems likely that existing legislation and the fourteenth amendment of the constitution will override this executive order, as it seems quite clear that neither source can be overruled by an executive order. 

The conceit at the the heart of this move: 

Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States:  (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

Obviously, these people are subject to the jurisdiction (i.e., laws) of the United States. The attempt to stretch definitions to get around traditional definitions of jurisdiction are strange. 

Now, I want to make one more argument for why the current law is actually a good idea. It prevents (in a large and complicated country) needing to go back any further than the birth of a person to determine if they are citizens. The documentation of birth via a certificate of live birth ends the discussion. Because, otherwise, this runs the risk of creating a chain of uncertainty. Because the legal status of a person's parents (information that you can well imagine people not having access to) is germane to the determination of citizenship. 

Now because this EO is only forward looking, this problem will creep up slowly. But, for example, how do you know if your great grand parents had at least one citizen? Quick question -- what was your great grandfather's name? How certain are you of their immigration status? As it stands, this questioning ends the second somebody in a family is born in the United States. 

This also cures a second problem. What about records? How certain are we that the records of other people are correct? Remember, based on this EO being born in the US (and having a US certificate of live birth) is not enough and now you need to know your parents status at the time of your birth (and their parents, at the time of their birth, and really once you hit the 1920's things are just very different). 

The DACA group was already a tough call (illegally brought into the country as minors) but this doesn't even begin to hint at the problem of stateless people you can get with this EO.

The good news is that it is likely going nowhere, legally speaking, as the law is pretty well settled here and the new problems are not worth the gains.