Noah Smith on the LA fires

In general, the misinformation, finger-pointing, and political opportunism flew fast and furious. But if you remained calm, resisted the urge to dunk on your political enemies, and watched the situation unfold, I think there were a few important signals you could extract from the storm of information. Basically, the lessons I take away from the horrific L.A. fires are:

  • The insurance industry as we know it is in big trouble.

  • Climate change is making wildfires worse, but there’s not much we can do about that right now.

  • Forest management needs to get a lot more proactive, but is being blocked by regulation.

  • Wildfire preparedness is just a lot more important than it used to be.

— Noah Smith

I thought this was a great post about our current wild fires and the reality of insurance in this moment. This is a live issue in Oregon, where a state-wide wildfire risk map is causing an uproar because of the wide risk to people’s homes. This map will hopefully be used to pass regulation around fire hardening homes, which is an important step towards helping people’s homes survive fires.



Hey there! I'm Eric and I work on communities in the world of software documentation. Feel free to email me if you have comments on this post!