Isegoria

Casey Handmer suggests that the Los Angeles wildfires are self-inflicted:

Caveats aside, my family and I are safe, we evacuated for several days, and due to heroic efforts by professional firefighters and psychotically brave neighbors, my house and most of my neighborhood escaped destruction. We were the lucky ones — by far. In 2019, as my wife and I were house hunting, we inspected multiple homes in the Pasadena area. Every house we looked at in Altadena burned to the ground last week.

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Fire is a self-propagating reaction, in which fuels (typically wood, which is made of many copies of CH2O) react with oxygen to form CO2 and H2O, releasing heat. The rate of the reaction determines the size and speed of the fire. Chemical reaction rates are limited by available surface area, which is why twigs and kindling burn really quickly, while enormous tree trunks burn very slowly.

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A ground fire burns sticks and leaves that have fallen to the ground. A surface fire burns low-lying shrubs and smaller trees, separate from but still close to the ground. In extreme conditions and with the help of bridging fuel, a fire can jump from mostly dead leaf litter to the living crown of the forest – lots of tiny twigs surrounded by plenty of oxygen for combustion.

Remember, the living part of the tree, the cambium layer, is a thin surface between the bark and the core. In extreme heat, the water in the cambium boils, blowing the fire-protectant bark off the tree, creating even more fuel.

When I was a young child in Australia, a crown fire near my home on the New South Wales central coast was so severe running up one hill it not only burned the leaves (many Australian trees can survive this by sprouting more leaves called epicormic shoots) but also the trunk and root system, leaving only smoking holes in the ground.

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Every year, more fuel is added. After a year or two, the seed bed has sprouted and plants are growing. After five years, shrubs are dense enough that walking requires effort and evasion. After 20 years, fallen litter and growth can be so dense that lost hikers may require a helicopter to extract.

The biomass accumulation rate is something like 0.5 mm/year (1/64th of an inch), which doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that 20 years of accumulation is equivalent to coating the entire forest in a layer of gasoline ¼” thick. This is not hyperbole, drought resistant trees including eucalypts and creosote secrete volatile oils to help retain moisture, contributing to their combustibility.

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Let’s take some advice from founding father Benjamin Franklin.

In the February 4, 1735 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Benjamin Franklin wrote that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Mr Franklin was not referring to medicine when he penned the now-famous line. He instead was referring to the importance of fire safety and the need for the city of Philadelphia to be better prepared to prevent and react to fires. In his article, he noted the importance of tending to how hot coals were being transferred in shovels (primary prevention), how chimneys should be cleaned regularly (primary prevention), and how a “club or society of active men” (firefighters) should be formed who can efficiently extinguish fires (tertiary prevention).

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To take just one example, the Black Saturday fires of February 7, 2009 killed 173 people and destroyed thousands of structures, including substantially entire towns.

In an ongoing process of regulatory adjustment and reform, the New South Wales fire service most recently adopted rule 10/50, which gives homeowners the right to clear trees within 10 meters of a home and non-tree vegetation within 50 meters of a home, without approvals. No friction!

In contrast, in the US, well-intended but poorly considered rule changes frequently make it harder to comply with regulations and increase friction, reducing the ability to do the obviously correct thing.

For federal- and state-funded fire prevention efforts, laws like NEPA and CEQA are often weaponized by special interest advocacy groups, resulting in ludicrous outcomes such as the US Forest Service spending 40% of its budget (!) on permitting-related activities.

NEPA, a law passed in 1970, was intended to help protect the environment. Subsequent regulatory interpretation (now in doubt due to Chevron being overturned) has expanded the law from just five pages of text to an overwhelming blizzard of rules that have brought our ability to build things to a grinding halt.

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Remember, after 5 years even dry chaparral scrub has accumulated enough biomass to burn well — and it literally takes longer than that to complete an Environmental Impact Statement review.

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In this analysis, it is quite clearly the law that hazard reduction burns are illegal, since despite their utility being extremely high and their cost almost trivially low (recall that indigenous societies that lack writing and money seem to be able to allocate the necessary resources for their successful execution) they do not occur at anything like the rate necessary to provide actual protection to people and property.

Who, then, governs us? Who is actually making law?

The answer is a handful of unelected specialists in bureaucracy. The key decision makers within the US Forest Service, CALFIRE, the BLM, the CCC, and their symbiotes at the Sierra Club, The John Muir Project, the Center for Biological Diversity and so on could fit quite easily onto a single Greyhound bus. You don’t know their names. They never appear on TV. They are unelected. Their position is often based on seniority rather than merit. They are effectively unfireable and thus unaccountable to anyone, not even the duly elected Governor. Generally speaking their salaries are far from exceptional, particularly in the public service and non-profit space. They’re not doing it for yacht money and it’s a fair assumption that for most of them (as well as most of us), a career in the upper echelons of business or private industry would be unattainable. Generally they are well-intentioned first order thinkers whose local ideological gradient and surrounding incentive landscape dictates their actions with eerie predictability. All of them are opinionated as to the cause and responsibility for these fires, and none of them will point a finger inward.

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Since 1988 under Prop 103, the Californian insurance industry has been heavily regulated. In practice, this means that insurers can calculate risk premiums but, like regulated utilities, need government permission to raise rates. Raising rates is politically unpopular, so insurers tend to cancel policies they can no longer justify, many of them in the areas that just burned. Insurers are in a bind, because their risk is driven up by government inaction on risk reduction, and their ability to recover costs is crushed by that same government. They leave the market. The CA state government’s response is to form a publicly funded insurer, which recently was barely solvent with about $200m in reserves, or about $20,000 per lost structure. This is not going to cover losses, to put it mildly.

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Mayor Bass zoomed back from her trip to Ghana to attend a series of agonizingly embarrassing press conferences, her city anxious to hear how she would lead them beyond this crisis. Her response: price controls on rentals and construction.

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Not to be outdone, Governor Newsom dropped an EO on “predatory real estate sales”. This is just weird. In a situation where tens of thousands of people are still evacuated, and thousands more are now homeless, fires are still burning, and the incandescently stupid regulations that led directly to dozens of destructive fires including these ones still stand, apparently the problem worthy of a press conference is people offering to buy ruined houses – in a state where rebuilding will probably take years. Any landowner can always say “no”.

Speculation has swirled as to whether this is an attempt to make wrecked neighborhoods harder to depopulate, since both Pacific Palisades and Altadena are relatively high income communities full of the sorts of taxpayers who have been fleeing California in recent years.

Or perhaps the land changing hands without approved new construction would lock in lower Prop 13 land tax revenue than the state was counting on.

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As for Los Angeles, we can easily predict future fires in areas that haven’t burned.

Although the ten-year term of the Consulate was not due to expire until 1810, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), in May 1802 a Senate motion to extend it for a second ten-year term passed by sixty to one:

This led to seemingly spontaneous but in fact well-orchestrated calls for a new Constitution of the Year X, under which Napoleon would become First Consul for life. ‘You judge that I owe the people another sacrifice,’ he disingenuously told the Senate. ‘I will give it if the people’s voice orders what your vote now authorizes.’ Like Julius Caesar refusing the Roman diadem twice, he wanted it to look as if he were being dragged reluctantly to lifelong power.

In January 2011, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua was in the middle of her book tour for Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in her hotel room in Seattle, when an email came in from a first-year law student who had a question about his upcoming exam in her Contracts class:

Three hours later, probably after a beer, he writes me another email, and he’s like, ‘You know what? I should be studying, but I’m so curious about all this furor, so I went to Barnes & Noble, and I read it,’” she said, referring to her book. “He’s like, ‘I do not know why this is controversial.’”

Then, he told her, “You remind me of Mamaw” — Vance’s grandmother, who raised him with the same tough love that courses through Tiger Mother.

Vance added that he “felt a little bit bad” for giving her the impression that he came from an intact family, saying things were “more complicated” back home. He attached a document to the email, “and it’s the opening of Hillbilly Elegy,” Chua said, “and even though I was in trauma about my own situation, I read this thing, and I said, ‘J.D., you have to write your own book.’?”

Which, of course, he did.

Chua connected Vance with her agent, and in June 2016 — just over four months before Donald Trump was elected to the White House for the first time — the book was published. Progressive America loved it. They thought of Vance as their in-house anthropologist, the man who could explain these sad, strange people who had just voted for The Great Satan.

“She helped create the origin story for the person who’s the future vice president of the United States,” a former student, who is now an attorney in New York, told me. “That’s classic Amy Chua.”

On Thursday, March 25, 1802, after nearly six months of negotiations, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), France and Britain signed a peace treaty at Amiens:

France had kept all her ‘natural’ frontiers up to the Rhine and the Alps, retained hegemony over western Europe, and had all her colonies restored to her. Yet in a sense Joseph and Talleyrand had been too successful: because Britain gained so little, her commitment to the peace was correspondingly weak.

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On the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens, around 5,000 Britons descended on Paris. Some were curious, some wanted to see the Louvre collections, some wanted to use that excuse to visit the fleshpots of the Palais-Royal (which did a roaring trade), some wanted to renew old friendships and almost all of them wanted to meet or at least catch a glimpse of the First Consul.

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The Irish MP John Leslie Foster attended one of Napoleon’s levées at the Tuileries, and described him as:

delicately and gracefully made; his hair a dark brown crop, thin and lank; his complexion smooth, pale and sallow; his eyes grey, but very animated; his eyebrows light brown, thin and projecting. All his features, particularly his mouth and nose, fine, sharp, defined, and expressive beyond description … He speaks deliberately, but very fluently, with particular emphasis, and in a rather low tone of voice. While he speaks, his features are still more expressive than his words. Expressive of what? … A pleasing melancholy, which, whenever he speaks, relaxes into the most agreeable and gracious smile you can conceive … He has more unaffected dignity than I could conceive in man.

Similarly, a former captive of the French called Sinclair wrote of ‘the grace and fascination of his smile’, and a Captain Usher said he had ‘dignified manners’.

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Napoleon took this opportunity to infiltrate spies to make plans of Irish harbours, but they were soon unmasked and repatriated.

At 9 p.m. on Monday, January 4, 1802, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon’s brother Louis was married to Josephine’s daughter Hortense by the mayor of Paris’ 1st arrondissement:

It was only one of a large number of marriages arranged by Napoleon, whose involvement in the nuptial lives of others was almost uniformly disastrous–certainly so in this case, as very soon Louis, who was in love with someone else at the time, could hardly bear to share a room with Hortense, and vice versa. Napoleon treated Hortense as his own daughter. Everyone liked her except the man Napoleon selected to marry her.

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Reviving the old royal practice by which generals and senior dignitaries had to ask the head of state’s permission to marry, Napoleon attempted to marry his generals into Ancien Régime families. The marriages that Napoleon opposed, such as Lucien’s and Jérôme’s (to his first wife), tended to be happier than the ones that he and Josephine matchmade.