What is happening in California right now is both sad and scary. I woke up to these photos in the New York Times. So I spent the morning reading up on wildfires and what causes them.
I am sure many of you are thinking: Is climate change doing this?
It’s important to note that California is designed to burn. The characteristics that make the state a highly desirable place to live – mild winters and hot and dry summers – also make it a highly flammable place.
Below is a map from Popular Science showing how much of California has burned over the last 5 years. Most of California’s hottest fires (13 of the top 20) have occurred since 2000.
“Every unemployed American is a failure of entrepreneurial imagination.” -Edward Glaeser
At the end of September, economist Edward Glaeser returned to the Manhattan Institute to deliver the 2017 James Q. Wilson Lecture. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may remember that he was there in 2016 and delivered a presentation called “The End of Work.”
This year’s talk continues that theme, but focuses on joblessness and economic stagnation in the US Heartland.
The solutions he puts forward are based on a very simple economic model for growth that he refers to as “rules and schools.” Simply put: The rules of a place need to support business and entrepreneurship and the people need to be educated.
One example he gives is of a woman in Detroit who was trying to start a food truck business but had to wait 18 months for a permit. There’s no reason that should happen. He blames the insider restaurant lobby for working to keep competition at bay. The rules are bad. We have similar problems here in Toronto with our food trucks. I think it’s wrong.
Though since Ed Glaeser published Triumph of the City and declared Houston’s unfettered sprawl the secret sauce for housing affordability, it is now frequently held up as the shining example of why housing supply matters.
But this is a hotly debated topic.
Ed Glaeser would argue that increased supply is the key to housing affordability. But Richard Florida would likely be quick to point out that Houston is also one of the most unequal and segregated cities in America. It is not the model we should be following.
But let’s be positive today on the blog.
At the bottom of this post is a great talk by
But these naturally occurring fires are actually important for the regeneration of its forests. So one argument is that the current policy of “total fire suppression” is actually partially responsible for this increase in severe wildfires.
Low-intensity forests aren’t burning like they used to and it is creating more densely packed forests for even larger wildfires. In other words, through our actions we could be exchanging smaller and more frequent fires for bigger and more severe ones.
California had a population of about 24 million people in 1980. Today it is closer to 40 million. And much of that growth has occurred outside of existing urban areas (too hard to build). This has meant more people living in suburban and rural areas – adjacent to wildlands.
Ed Glaeser has repeatedly argued that the best way to respect nature is to actually stay as far away from it as possible. Humans are a destructive species. Living in a dense city is good for the planet.
Now let’s address the climate change issue.
Daniel Swain, who is a climate scientist and author of the Weather West blog, published this popular thread on Twitter about a day ago. At the time of writing this post, it had been retweeted and liked over 10,000 times.
From his perspective as a climate scientist, this is not all about climate change. That’s the wrong question to ask. It’s more complicated and nuanced than that. But climate does indeed act as a “threat multiplier” to the other factors we’ve already discussed.
Fire season typically begins and ends with rain. When the fall rainy season starts, the fire season ends. One of the biggest risk factors is a dry fall, particularly after a hot and dry summer (or after multiple hot and dry summers, as has been the case in California).
Because according to Swain, fall means the start of “offshore wind” season, which can help to stoke these wildfires.
Unfortunately, one of the projected outcomes of climate change for California is more precipitation concentrated in the “winter” months, at the expense of precipitation in the shoulder seasons (spring and fall). So that means a longer fire season.
Swain believes that if Northern California had received close to its typical amount of rain this fall, it is almost certain that this tragedy would have been avoided.
That, however, makes me wonder about the relative importance of all the factors we have discussed today.
. Yes, Frank Gehry created a beautiful piece of architecture. But did it lower the unemployment rate?
The last thing I’ll mention are his comments regarding Amazon HQ2 because I like how he frames it.
Firstly, Amazon is going select a city that doesn’t need Amazon. It’s going to go where there’s already abundant human capital.
Secondly, “smokestack chasing” is not the right economic development strategy. The key questions should be: How will this benefit our human capital and how many new firms could it create?
If you have an hour, check out Ed Glaeser’s talk. If you can’t see it below, click here.
. Klineberg is a Professor of Sociology at Rice University and the founder of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
In this hour long talk, he outlines, among other things, the remarkable transformation of Houston from a one-industry town (oil) comprised predominantly of white people to a mixed economy where every major ethnicity is now a minority.
He also argues that Houston is at the forefront of the demographic shifts happening all across the country and that, without this inflow of immigrants over the past couple of decades, Houston today would probably look a lot like a decaying rustbelt city.
