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To be clear: California home owners insurance. One factor listed: post earthquake fires. California has "fire season," not a season I ever wanted in my life.

To be clear: California home owners insurance. One factor listed: post earthquake fires. California has "fire season," not a season I ever wanted in my life. I wonder how much this is actually kind of an issue of global warming without being called that. My understanding is fires are getting worse on the west coast thanks to climate change.

tehlike 3y ago
As far as i can tell, california forest management essentially ended up suppressing "good fires", and didn't do enough of controlled burns, which ended up accumulating a lot of fuel to cause large fires.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  It's probably a lot more complicated than that. For one thing, California is a place that imported eucalyptus. This is a fire hazard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37442671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37442671
  - tehlike 3y ago
    If eucalyptus is now fact of the state, what needs to be done to reduce its impact?
    - wbl 3y ago
      I find chainsaws work fine
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
      California could look to, I don’t know. Australia!? Instead of Americans again pretending that any problem they face is uniquely theirs.
- _DeadFred_ 3y ago
  Santa Cruz had huge wildfires when I was a kid in the 80s (it snowed ash even). The fire experts were pretty explicite that if the same policies were kept in place (preventing burn off) we would have those same fires 40 years later. It's 40 years later I wonder how that turned out.
  - hatthew 3y ago
    How it turned out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CZU_Lightning_Complex_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CZU_Lightning_Complex_fires
- etrautmann 3y ago
  That’s one piece of a larger picture, which includes climate change, snowpack, severe weather events, PG&E, etc.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rufus_foreman 3y ago
>> My understanding is fires are getting worse on the west coast thanks to climate change So, without taking a position on whether fires are getting worse, how would that matter for the insurance markets? There's a price that would make it work. Risks are higher, price of an insurance policy would be higher. Insurance companies, left to their own devices, wouldn't leave markets due to that, insurance companies would price risks accordingly, which is the thing that insurance companies do. That's the positive externality of insurance companies, they give you information about risk. Insurance companies leave markets when they aren't allowed to accurately price risk, which the state of California will not allow them to do.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  So, without taking a position on whether fires are getting worse, how would that matter for the insurance markets? I'm not arguing with you nor rebutting your claim. I haven't studied the situation in California and have no opinion about what is going on there. But I did work in insurance for a few years and insurance began as a form of betting or gambling. If the possibility of X happening is too high, it's no longer a gamble. So as the odds of being required to payout approaches 100 percent, they stop covering it because that's not what they do. This is why flood insurance in the US is provided by the federal government, not private insurers: Because most land with residential development floods. It's not a question of if but when, how often and how badly. Hurricane Andrew also significantly impacted the homeowners insurance industry. I don't recall the details at the moment, but this is not without precedent.
  - rufus_foreman 3y ago
    >> Because most land with residential development floods Every year? Not every year. It's a math problem. Insurance will cover it if they are free to set the premiums.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      It tends to be something the market won't bear though. If people can't afford it, pricing it as high as you want tends to cause the market to collapse anyway, just from a different mechanism. Some things simply don't work well when handled as a business model. Fire departments that only show up for people paying their fire dues don't work at all. In practice, places that require you to pay for fire department help have the fire department show up anyway and they watch your house burn down while standing around to be on hand just in case it threatens to spread beyond the uncovered property. Places where there is no police department and rich people all hire private security are also pretty dysfunctional socially. Some things get provided as a public good by sane societies because other formats for addressing it simply don't work.
infecto 3y ago
Most insurance companies have made pretty public statements about states not giving them the ability to properly account for global changes in climate. I don't think it has anything to do with what you are saying. There is no conspiracy that "fire season" is a code word for "climate change". Fire season is a complicated problem with many inputs but I am sure the lack of proper fire management of these lands did not help it.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  For the record, I never suggested that fire season was a code word for climate change. Just that fires are getting worse, fire hazard is being cited as a factor in this decision and I can't help but wonder if the thing not being explicitly spelled out is that this longstanding risk of post-earthquake fires is looming larger in the minds of insurance company decision makers because of this changing context. It doesn't require any conspiracy theories or intentional deceit for people to start going "Oh. X thing. That's too much risk." without them thinking to explicitly state "...because the context has changed since my dad or grandad founded the company, so the risk he felt ok with now feels like too much risk to me." People often don't spell everything out when talking about an issue. Humans are routinely kind of blind to their own implicit assumptions and the need to communicate them.

tehlike 3y ago

As far as i can tell, california forest management essentially ended up suppressing "good fires", and didn't do enough of controlled burns, which ended up accumulating a lot of fuel to cause large fires.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
It's probably a lot more complicated than that. For one thing, California is a place that imported eucalyptus. This is a fire hazard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37442671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37442671
- tehlike 3y ago
  If eucalyptus is now fact of the state, what needs to be done to reduce its impact?
  - wbl 3y ago
    I find chainsaws work fine
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    California could look to, I don’t know. Australia!? Instead of Americans again pretending that any problem they face is uniquely theirs.
_DeadFred_ 3y ago
Santa Cruz had huge wildfires when I was a kid in the 80s (it snowed ash even). The fire experts were pretty explicite that if the same policies were kept in place (preventing burn off) we would have those same fires 40 years later. It's 40 years later I wonder how that turned out.
- hatthew 3y ago
  How it turned out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CZU_Lightning_Complex_fires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CZU_Lightning_Complex_fires
etrautmann 3y ago
That’s one piece of a larger picture, which includes climate change, snowpack, severe weather events, PG&E, etc.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rufus_foreman 3y ago

>> My understanding is fires are getting worse on the west coast thanks to climate change So, without taking a position on whether fires are getting worse, how would that matter for the insurance markets? There's a price that would make it work. Risks are higher, price of an insurance policy would be higher. Insurance companies, left to their own devices, wouldn't leave markets due to that, insurance companies would price risks accordingly, which is the thing that insurance companies do. That's the positive externality of insurance companies, they give you information about risk. Insurance companies leave markets when they aren't allowed to accurately price risk, which the state of California will not allow them to do.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
So, without taking a position on whether fires are getting worse, how would that matter for the insurance markets? I'm not arguing with you nor rebutting your claim. I haven't studied the situation in California and have no opinion about what is going on there. But I did work in insurance for a few years and insurance began as a form of betting or gambling. If the possibility of X happening is too high, it's no longer a gamble. So as the odds of being required to payout approaches 100 percent, they stop covering it because that's not what they do. This is why flood insurance in the US is provided by the federal government, not private insurers: Because most land with residential development floods. It's not a question of if but when, how often and how badly. Hurricane Andrew also significantly impacted the homeowners insurance industry. I don't recall the details at the moment, but this is not without precedent.
- rufus_foreman 3y ago
  >> Because most land with residential development floods Every year? Not every year. It's a math problem. Insurance will cover it if they are free to set the premiums.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    It tends to be something the market won't bear though. If people can't afford it, pricing it as high as you want tends to cause the market to collapse anyway, just from a different mechanism. Some things simply don't work well when handled as a business model. Fire departments that only show up for people paying their fire dues don't work at all. In practice, places that require you to pay for fire department help have the fire department show up anyway and they watch your house burn down while standing around to be on hand just in case it threatens to spread beyond the uncovered property. Places where there is no police department and rich people all hire private security are also pretty dysfunctional socially. Some things get provided as a public good by sane societies because other formats for addressing it simply don't work.

infecto 3y ago

Most insurance companies have made pretty public statements about states not giving them the ability to properly account for global changes in climate. I don't think it has anything to do with what you are saying. There is no conspiracy that "fire season" is a code word for "climate change". Fire season is a complicated problem with many inputs but I am sure the lack of proper fire management of these lands did not help it.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
For the record, I never suggested that fire season was a code word for climate change. Just that fires are getting worse, fire hazard is being cited as a factor in this decision and I can't help but wonder if the thing not being explicitly spelled out is that this longstanding risk of post-earthquake fires is looming larger in the minds of insurance company decision makers because of this changing context. It doesn't require any conspiracy theories or intentional deceit for people to start going "Oh. X thing. That's too much risk." without them thinking to explicitly state "...because the context has changed since my dad or grandad founded the company, so the risk he felt ok with now feels like too much risk to me." People often don't spell everything out when talking about an issue. Humans are routinely kind of blind to their own implicit assumptions and the need to communicate them.