Too many environmentally minded people are under the impression that environmental preservation means holding an ecological system in stasis to prevent change. I think this is a decent article showing a few of the reasons that those ideas need a little rethinking on what it means to help the environment.
Disagree: Environmentalists (at least here in California) understand that fire has a role in forest management. Parties opposed to that course of action are the homeowners in the forests and portions of the timber industry who would prefer to log the unnaturally dense forests (caused by fire suppression).
It's worth considering that this angle is frequently and aggressively pushed by parties which want to discredit all environmentalists for various reasons.
One decent underwater rock-slide in Hawaii will end the need to debate conservation in California. Likewise in the Azores for New Jersey. Nature doesn't judge nor plan, it just happens.
I got a "YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR ARTICLE LIMIT" banner after the first paragraph, but the banner looked so much like all the other crap on the site that I had looked over it. I spent 2 entire minutes figuring out where the hell the rest of the article was.
I think paywalls are a pretty good idea so no comment there, but if you want people to sign up, at least make sure the place is otherwise void of mess so people can find the "buy" button.
I simply read the article behind the banner, it scrolled just fine and was quite readable. I have no problem not using an ad blocker to read articles however I do expect sites to present such requests neatly.
In firefox, you can 'open link in new private window' - as long as you only have one article open at a time, you can read as many articles as you want.
btw - The Economist has had poor business execution for at least the last 2 decades - a nice irony given how they like to lecture others on how to run things.
My experience (and others' I know) of buying subscriptions has been a pain - mail sent to totally incorrect address, also time between signing up and delivery being many weeks.
Their on-line subscription used to allow many tens of people to use 1 account, simultaneously (I cannot be sure whether this was a clever way to increase readership&advertising revenue, or whether their systems didn't detect multiple simultaneous logins from different countries on 1 account).
It is possible to have a fine product, but poor execution on the business/commercial side. e.g. many UK football clubs have historically had a fine product (rights to view football matches etc) but have failed to make the most of it in a business sense. Some have been commercially successful, despite squandering income opportunities.
As a Coloradan, this is something that we have been especially hard hit by. More and more people are living in/around our national forests in the mountains. Naturally, they don't want to deal with fires, nor the remnants left behind (charred landscape for a decade or more.)
But as this article alludes to, it has to burn. It does naturally. We have to let go - we are wasting valuable resources to fight these fires. People have _died_ fighting these fires. And for what? So your house doesn't burn down?
I'm sorry, but a fire is typically a slow-moving natural disaster. It rarely strikes without a fair warning. I've been saying for years now that if you live in a potential burn area, know where your irreplaceables are, carry fire insurance, evacuate and LET IT BURN.
"Carry Fire Insurance" -- That raises the fundamental economic issue, which surprisingly the Economist was silent; a policy of fire suppression is a subsidy for the people who choose to live int he forest. If there wasn't a policy of fire suppression, a home owner wouldn't be able to get fire insurance, and without it, they wouldn't be able to get a mortgage so fewer homes would be built in the forest.
All of the premium non-hurricane, non-forest land, is taken already by rich people. Isn't it subsidising rich people if we allow them to live on the best land, while others contributing to society elsewhere observe no benefit?
Almost every region comes with its own set of possible natural disasters. Maybe we are better off pooling everything and just have natural disaster insurance that covers fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, blizzard, and so on.
Yes, almost every area has it's own disasters to worry about, but it's a mistake to assume that the frequency and average damage for each type of disaster and each area normalizes out to a similar value.
That is obviously true, but that doesn't stop other insurance industries. A healthy 40 year old women and a 70 year old man with heart disease are going to have different prices for a $1m life insurance policy, but both policies will pay out equally regardless of when they die.
I'm not saying home insurance needs to be the same cost for everyone, but the current situation of specialized policies that vary house to house in each region is overly complex. Plus climate change is changing the risk profile for everyone and the results of which are not yet clearly understood by climate scientists let alone random homeowners.
> but the current situation of specialized policies that vary house to house in each region is overly complex
I actually think it's not complex enough. How else do you accurately price natural disasters into existing homes, whose ownership is often measured in decades? I think any area with a chance over a certain percent of a natural disaster that could cause catastrophic loss of property should require insurance, and the insurance cost should be as accurate as possible to the reality of living in that location.
7. allentown pennsylvania* (actually east, not midwest)
6. dayton ohio*
5. bethesda maryland
4. buffalo new york
3. akron ohio*
2. cleveland ohio*
1. syracuse new york
Hmm, maybe you're thinking of the central US? also known as 'tornado alley'?
The definition of various 'areas' of the US are ill defined, but its clear, at least from my experience living in the midwest and having never experienced a single disaster in the 25 years I've been here, that the midwest is definitely the safest from natural disasters.
Are the astericks there meant to denote midwest? Allentown is further east than Syracuse, Buffalo, and Bethesda, so it isn't midwest.
It is also worth noting that almost all of the cities listed are heavily impacted by snow which it doesn't sound like it was factored in to the ranking. Dealing with large snowfalls have a huge costs although it might not be factored in to normal home insurance since there is generally minimal property damage. It might be interesting to see a cost comparison between dealing with large snowfalls and other less frequent but more damaging weather phenomena like hurricanes or tornadoes.
Finally, Ohio certainly sees less tornadoes than most of the midwest, but it still receives a lot compared to the western US. Here is a nice visual summary of recorded tornadoes [1]. This one [2] is of especial interest and shows all tornadoes that have caused $50+ million in damage which would be important when talking about insurance. Tornado alley certainly gets more tornadoes, but Ohio is right up with them in terms of damage mainly due to the comparative development of the various areas.
I think i was thinking of youngstown ohio - i updated the list
As for ohio, I count 6 tornados on there, maybe 7? (i might be reading it wrong)
since 1950?
I'd say thats pretty low risk.
How many earthquakes have we had in that time?
How many hurricanes have caused billions of damage in that time? Floods/draught/etc
> which it doesn't sound like it was factored in to the ranking.
I dont think it was, it was ranked by natural disasters - so unless its a major blizzard it probably wouldnt be measured. (oh they probably didn't include hail either, which is uncommon, but more damaging to property)
I also dont think snow is on the same level as a natural disaster from an insurance risk perspective, but it likely results in greater or at least similar fatalities overall so i think its a fair point.
I'm not arguing the midwest is immune to all danger, i'm only saying living there puts you at lower risk of being affected by a natural disaster - /and/ - that the land there isn't already owned by 'rich people' (to take us back to why i commented in the first place)
Also - i wish that tornado map was interactive, would be great to see more of the filters
Indiana farmland costs $4400/acre to buy, costs $160/acre-year to rent, and produces 150 corn bushels/acre-year or 50 soy bushels/acre-year. That sells for $3.50/corn bushel, and $9.00/soy bushel.
Doing the math, it's pretty easy to guess that all that midwestern land is probably owned by "rich people", too.
I put that in scare quotes because there is some element of circularity involved. If you own 120 acres of cornfields, you have over $500k worth of property. So do you own the land because you're rich, or are you rich because you own the land?
>Doing the math, it's pretty easy to guess that all that midwestern land is probably owned by "rich people", too.
Now do that math with land values in Detroit.
I think its well accepted that land values are generally quite higher on both coasts than the midwest. Agricultural land values are not very useful for estimating the cost of residential land
But there is a lot more agricultural/forestry land out there in America than residential. There are more people living in Cook, DuPage, and Lake counties than the entire rest of the state of Illinois. 53% of the population on 3% the land area.
Ted Turner didn't get to own 2M acres of land by buying in Atlanta. Much of that is bison ranches.
There are a lot of people out there that own no more than 0.25 acre, which is pledged as security for a mortgage.
If you own land outright, free of liens and mortgages, whether rural or urban or in between, you're already way ahead of most people. You may not be actual rich, but "rich" by comparison with your neighbors.
Peering under the covers of agribusiness in the U.S. was somewhat enlightening. It would appear that one should not attempt a farming start-up without at least $1M in the bank, and you will only get about an 8% return on it per year, on average. Small farms simply do not make money; you cannot run a small farm as your sole source of income and expect to earn the equivalent of minimum wage.
So the natural conclusion I reached from my cursory research is that the vast majority of raw acreage in the U.S. is probably owned by investment trusts, who lease it for farming, mining, ranching, and logging, to people who barely earn a profit, and mostly just immediately spend 70% of everything they earn on expenses.
There's a good reason why YCombinator invests in tech start-ups instead of plows and cows.
The US states least affected by natural disasters are Alaska, Main, Michigan and Vermont; based on your post, I assume they're filled with rich people?
It is interesting that some of the poorest, white-trash areas of the country are the safest. At least in Maine, the only natural disaster I can remember is the ice storm of 98, which, aside from knocking out power for a week, mostly amounted to an extra week of school vacation that winter.
In the West(-ern US), a great deal of it is actually owned by the federal government[0]. Should it be sold to provide homes for people that otherwise would live in hurricane areas?
I'd argue that flood insurance isn't necessarily the same thing, at least in some cases. I live in an area with three rivers and lots of creeks and runs that feed those rivers. It isn't always "natural" for the sections of the river, or those creeks to flood. It takes a lot of rain, in some cases "act of God" levels. Flood insurance seems pretty reasonable in those cases, particularly since in many cases, there isn't a ton of flood preventation infrastructure that has been built with tax money.
in most cases we're talking about people who build their houses in category 1 storm surge / 10 year flood zones and then expect a subsidy when inevitably natures does what it does.
> It isn't always "natural" for the [...] the river [...] to flood. It takes a lot of rain, in some cases "act of God" levels.
That's a weird definition for "natural" you're using. I think you mean something more like "typical". Unless you're making a theological point, an "act of God" is quite literally as natural (in the sense of un-artificial) as you can get.
But the grandparent's point was economic. Disaster insurance can't work: the whole idea behind insurance is that "bad stuff" happens rarely to some people, so everyone pools money together to pay for the few who actually needed. Disasters happen broadly, and to everyone who needs it in the affected area. A "correct" insurance scheme there would be tantamount to everyone having to just save money on their own, there's no efficiency. And of course in practice the insurance companies cheat and don't save enough, so people don't actually get paid.
> And of course in practice the insurance companies cheat and don't save enough, so people don't actually get paid.
Or changing conditions throw off their actuarial tables, making the company insolvent when reality intercedes. Those changes could be as obvious (at this stage) as climate change, or as subtle as a long-standing practice of preventing forest fires, which while seemingly preventing property loss to fire is actually creating an unstable system which has the capability for much larger destruction than the typical fire.
While this is true. It does not mean that they are not "normal." They are just so rare as to allow a party to get out of a contract.
As a society, we cannot ignore the cost of the "Act of God" level disasters when summing up the cost of said disaster. If an insurance companies might be able to avoid paying out on a claim doesn't mean property (or lives) did not get lost.
Just wanted to give some color to BMJ's comment for most people who would not be familiar with the legal boilerplate, as his comment was interpreted as theological by some.
In my mind the issue is pretty simple: if you buy a house in a wild-fire prone area, you should expect a wildfire at some point. Whether or not you want to prepare by a) purchasing insurance or b) wild-fire proofing your house is your prerogative. If you're not willing to take/mitigate the risk, then live somewhere else.
True, but not really relevant. I mean, that article literally (!) calls out flood insurance as a situation where such "acts" are subject to the contract.
Property and casualty insurance spreads out risk over a large group of people during the same time period. P&C insurers have it easy. They can pay out claims from the premiums that come in, and take the leftovers as their profit.
Life insurance spreads out risk over a large span of time for the same person. Life insurers have to be more careful. They have to invest the premiums wisely, so that they will have exactly enough cash on hand to pay out the amount of the policy on the expected date it comes due (along with some profit). If the person dies earlier than expected, they could lose money. If the person dies later, they could get more profit. Furthermore, if the investment market is unexpectedly good or bad, that affects the insurer's ability to pay the benefit. Life insurers can rely on the fact that while all people eventually die, they don't all croak at once. There's actually a predictable rate, so if you get enough people to buy policies, you're never paying out more than you take in.
Disaster insurance is more like life insurance, but even harder to pull off, because all those benefits are probably going to be paid at exactly the same time. So what insurers have to do is take that gigantic, elephant-choking payout and let each underwriter take a little bite of it, until it's all accounted for. They're spreading the risk over multiple people, long periods of time, and multiple investors. And even so, thanks to the fact that it is essentially an enforced savings scheme, a big enough disaster would be a shock to the financial markets.
But there's no way around that. If a storm destroys one of your windows, you're going to be buying a new window, instead of some other thing that you may have wanted more. If it destroys your whole town, a lot of money is going to shift from savings and investments into construction.
There is some advantage to having disaster insurance. First off, ordinary people are absolutely horrible at reasonably judging risks. Second, we are also pretty bad at compartmentalizing our savings and investments. If you have a 100-Year Flood fund, and a Yellowstone Goes Kablooie fund, and a Bad Tornado Season fund, and your grocery budget stands at $20 for this month, would you have the fortitude to eat nothing but beans and rice for four weeks? And third, institutional investors manage money better than a lot of individuals, and can take better advantage of the tax laws. It isn't hard to just dump everything into the Fideliguard Some of Everything Index Fund, but some people still put all their money in an ordinary commercial bank savings account, where the interest doesn't even cover the monthly service fees, but it still gets taxed.
But as you say, a lot of those advantages can disappear to just one bad actor in the insurance company trying to cheat a little for some personal gain. The best thing people can do to manage disasters is to be aware of their own risks, and to plan ahead only for those scenarios that have a reasonable likelihood of occurring.
That isn't true. It's a law that insurance companies must have the money to pay claims. That's what reinsurance protects insurance companies against. People don't get paid because they didn't suffer a covered loss. I was a catastrophe insurance adjuster for Farmers insurance during Katrina and Hurricane Ike and the unpaid damages where often for damages not caused by a covered event: for example a destroyed wooden floor with no evidence of roof leakage would often be denied unless they had Flood insurance. We also have massive amounts of attempted fraud. People attempting to claim full value on a roof that was 20 years old. The amount of fraud in the property insurance business amounts to literally billions. Also denied claims are easily challenged with a public adjuster. I had plenty of debates with public adjusters and there were time when I did legitimately underpay a claim. Damage estimating is a very inexact science. There are dozens of variables such as material cost fluctuations, damage area material cost gouging, contractor shortages they lead to out of state contractors coming in charging higher than the prevailing rate for a given piece of work. The meme that insurance companies are evil is simplistic. The amount of regulation in that industry is astounding. I had to get separate licenses in 18 states. A few other states has reciprocity agreements but generally I had to pass exams just to step foot in a state in any official capacity. I am definitely not referring to health companies though.. Can't speak to that, but the property and casualty side of things isn't as terrible as it's anecdotally portrayed. During Ike, I wrote 12 checks per day which meant 16 hours a day on rooftops wading through debris and occasionally coming across human remains. Yet less than 5% of the claims I worked were denied and generally only partially.
It's exactly the same thing. Flood insurance enables people to build houses in places where there are going to be floods, just like fire insurance enables people to build in tinderboxes. Which would be fine if the person who buys the house there carried a financial burden proportional to the risk.
there isn't a ton of flood preventation infrastructure that has been built with tax money.
All flood prevention infrastructure outside of the dirt berm at the local pond was built with tax money. Been to, say, New Orleans recently?
Societies subsidize people who live in flood plains because of agriculture, infrastructure and logistics. Essentially, we get far more OUT of people living in MOST flood plains than we put in with respect to subsidies.
Consider MOST of the coastal cities. We, obviously, get WAY more OUT of Houston, Galveston and New Orleans, for example, than we put in. Those three ports are enormously important to us. If they disappeared tomorrow, you would discover why they were important the hard way.
Similarly for people living in midwestern flood plains. We will typically get far more out of them than we put in. Try feeding the world, with currently known agricultural technology, while not using any land in flood plains and you'll see what I mean. Even if you could somehow manage to do it... and I don't think you could.... but even if you could, you would cause enormous damage to the ecological tapestry of the continent. You would have to move MATERIAL amounts of water and soil at a minimum. It's best to subsidize the farmers to do what they do and make sure they're not disturbed in their endeavors. And, yes, many of those farmers and agribusinesses will be in flood plains.
Now I'm not saying ALL flood plains in the midwest or on the coast are critical infrastructure. New York, Houston and New Orleans are far more critical to our survival than... say... Miami, Myrtle Beach or Malibu. So obviously, I'm not saying that ALL port cities or ALL midwestern flood plains are critical. But there are definitely some places in this nation that merit sizable subsidies to keep people living and working there. It's the nature of the beast when you're talking about engineering an empire.
For any activities that really are that valuable, there is no need for a subsidy. The revenue from the activity in those cases exceeds the costs of dealing with the disaster.
The efficient thing to do is end the subsidy, and have all the less valuable activities whose benefits don't exceed the costs relocate or cease.
Efficiency must be balanced, though. Say that we end the subsidy on agricultural flood plains, which drives up the cost to farmers, who become less competitive vs imported food. They decide to close up shop and do something more profitable, since they can't complete with imports. The end result is an increase in efficiency but a loss of food security.
I'm sure other people have thought this through much better than what I just said. But it seems to me to be a reasonable argument.
If your goal is people growing more food relative to baseline, you should subsidize food (which we do, intensively).
If your goal is people living in flood zones, you should subsidize living in flood zones (e.g. by insuring it, which we also do).
We need an answer to the latter question in this case, not the former. And one is readily at hand: the political interest of those who live in flood zones. Maybe there's some other justification, but I'll confess I'm skeptical that this outcome is globally utility maximizing relative to alternative policies.
A scholarship is an educational subsidy. Should we issue a moratorium on scholarships? Should we discontinue subsidies for solar energy companies? How about the billions in R&D tax subsidies that we give to pharmaceutical/industrial/healthcare companies each year to develop new drugs, treatments, and machinery?
The market doesn't always know what is right. To be more specific: the market is short-sighted and greedy, and can self-destruct an economy if left unregulated. We need to subsidize activities that have large costs in the short term, but return more over the long run to society. Or else they won't happen.
State funded 'generic' scholarships simply rise the cost of tuition. Good state schools are a much better use of funds as they drive down for profit education costs to be cost competitive. Schools can easily offer scholarships at minimal costs as a form of price discrimination, but public scholarships tend to simply result in administrative bloat.
Should we discontinue subsidies for solar energy companies?
How about the billions in R&D tax subsidies that we give to pharmaceutical/industrial/healthcare companies each year to develop new drugs, treatments, and machinery?
These should also be stopped, it's fine to fund public R&D but private R&D has terrible ROI. Drug companies spend more on advertising than R&D and really don't need help. For a solid example, the US could have a 10 year strategic food reserve for 1/10th the cost of current agro subsidies that directly result in massive health issues.
PS I agree that markets are often inefficient, but subsidies then to be horrible ways to correct them. Taxes tend to be much more efficient.
Taxes and subsidies are two sides of the same coin.
They are often used in conjunction to achieve specific policy ends. If you are pro taxes, you are pro subsidies. Perhaps not on the specific, case-by-case basis, but overall you are arguing for free market distortion through the yin and yang of government policy.
I won't address your specific points as everyone has different opinions on policy, but no one has the data to rigorously defend their opinions.
I simply want to refute the notion that we can allow free markets to allocate all resources within the economy.
Ok we can side step the specific examples and I agree with your point. But, at the meta level I still think taxes are generally a better solution independent of policy.
Taxes are much more scalable than subsidies. AKA if A is better for society than B but B is cheaper to produce then taxing B can balance things fairly easily with consumers paying society for the external costs. But, subsidizing A is an unbound cost, adds administrative overhead, and promotes consumption of A and or B.
The downsides of Taxes is there often regressive, but for something like alcohol, pollution, or speeding societal costs are often independent from a persons net worth.
Taxing CO2! Then how would we breathe! Think of the effect on laborers that breathe more strenuously than the rest of us. They be impoverished! On a serious note, you're implying that CO2 has a deleterious effect. Any scientific studies to back that claim?
Ending federal student loans would do more to reduce higher Ed inflation than anything else. It's unpopular because the people smart enough to understand economics aren't the ones continuing to vote for expanded federal loans.
If you want more people being educated, you should subsidize education.
If you want more R&D, you should subsidize R&D.
If you want more people living in burn zones, you should subsidize living in burn zones.
I think I join most Americans in saying that I'd rather more people be educated, I'd rather have more R&D, and I wouldn't rather more people live in burn zones.
So a worker that works in Houston ought not have flood protection? Who pays when his house floods? "Industry?" Then prices rise for everyone instead of isolating the risk to those that choose to buy flood insurance.
Houston and New York are also designed with an expectation that those cities will flood. Most buildings in Houston, for example, forgo a basement and instead have a collecting vault underneath them that the rain drains into and from (and leaves more slowly and sustainably). There are fields set aside to ensure that there's land that can flood with minimal impact. County flood control districts will buy up property just to let it be undeveloped.
There are ways to mitigate the risks of living in a flood plain while still reaping the benefits.
How are buildings in NYC designed with an expectation that they will flood? I haven't seen much of that, especially pre-Sandy. Post-Sandy there are some buildings with mounting brackets for walls/sandbags if there's another flood but that's not really designed in.
Most floods are only a few inches deep. It isn't expensive to simply build the house up a foot or two, or bulldoze a mound and put the house on that. It'll greatly reduce the probability and severity of flood damage.
Houses can also be made much more fire resistant than they are. Use metal and masonry for the exterior surfaces rather than wood and asphalt, for example. Keep the fuel and vegetation away from the walls. Build a masonry fence as a fire break. It's all just common sense.
Some friends of mine built a house this way in Montana, and the firefighters told them that if all Montanans built their wilderness homes that way, their job would be a lot easier.
You can find a lot of information on this by googling for "fire resistant home".
Fires will jump over that masonry. Unless you live in a concrete dome, the fire will get across. These are infernos not unlike the fires of hell. Fire is almost raining down on you. Fire resistant doesn't work in the middle of a serious wildfire.
Just to play devil's advocate. What about the amount of greenhouse gases released by the fires? We're clearly not succeeding in reducing our greenhouse gases, so why not reduce it where we can?
Forest fires are a cyclic phenomenon complemented by forest growth. Best to let nature find its own equilibria and change human processes to be sustainable.
You mean the greenhouse gasses that were originally sequestered by the forest into a cellulose matrix and which were inevitably going to be re-released when the tree died and the wood rotted? Yeah, I don't think the process works the way you think it does.
Most of the time when wood rots, it still sequesters CO2. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to create soil through the accumulation of biomass. All the dirt would be mineral only, and no black soil would exist anywhere. The blackness of black soil is due primarily to carbon. Which isn't floating around in the air.
Seems like the difference in timescale between soil creation and wood decomposition would argue against sequestration occurring "most of the time." Soil biomass might represent only 1% or so of decomposition products. But I haven't seen any actual figures...
Trees are big and take up a lot of room, but there's way way way more dirt than trees. Good soil is actually upwards of 5% organic matter which is non-trivial. 5% of all the good dirt left in the world is a very big number and probably dominates the weight of trees on the planet.
Compared to the CO2 that has been "permanently" sequestered in the Earth's crust through coal and oil, the trees involved in the fires contain a relatively trivial amount of CO2.
In the US, we are succeeding in reducing the rate of growth in CO2 emission. We're not yet succeeding in reducing total gases. We'd be a lot more successful if we stopped subsidizing the production and consumption of oil and coal. In 2013, the IEA estimates US$548 billion (annually) of global subsidy to fossil fuel. And the IMF calculates that including external costs (pollution), US$5.3 trillion of subsidy in 2015.
Interestingly, far more wood smoke is released into the air during winter than during peak fire season. If the stated aim is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions then from a cost/benefit perspective moving away from burning wood for heat to a cleaner form of energy makes far more sense than fighting fires.
It does has to burn. This is why we have prescribed burns, to safely burn the forest and reduce future wildfire damages.
The article says that the portion of the budget dedicated to fighting fires keeps increasing, giving less money to land management decided to prevent a lot of the fires we are fighting. Seems to me that continuing on this path will just result in ever increasing costs. We have to let it burn, on our terms.
Logging helps a lot too. I don't get why it's such a controversial topic, I don't advocate chopping down entire forests, but why on earth are commercial loggers not allowed to thin things out?
When have commercial loggers ever "thinned things out?" Since the beginning it's always been a "choose a section of forest and start chopping until nothing is left" industry.
Well for one, that's not entirely true. Loggers plant just about as many trees as they cut down. Otherwise they'd be out of business pretty quick. And even when they chop, "thinning things out" is a perfectly valid way of logging and is practiced in many places.
Secondly, the question was "why don't they thin things out". Not "why don't we let them thin things out". Implying a change to normal behavior.
This is patently untrue, at least in the United States. Maybe if you are doing slash-and-burn agriculture in the Brazilian Amazon. Even for clear-cutting, you have to leave a regulated number of stems, of certain diameters, on the piece of land.
Typically, the way you would cut a piece of land is by selectively cutting out the species and grades of lumber that are actually worth money. So one winter you go in and cut the big, high-quality pine, or spruce and fir for saw logs. Another season you might cut out the high-quality veneer-grade hardwood trees. Of course, when you do this, you would also cut a bunch of the junk that is never going to grow into profitable timber, and sell that as pulpwood for making paper, or low-quality logs for making pallets, or sell it as firewood. If you selectively cut like this, it's not particularly difficult to rotate through a series of stands and continue to harvest them indefinitely, and you maintain a variable-age forest that sustains the local wildlife, to boot.
At least on the East coast, it's not really necessary to replant cut sections, even if you do go in and clear cut them, since there is so much residual seed on the ground already, and many of the species will even sprout again from stump. You go through a short cycle of black/raspberries and other scrub growth to fix the soil, then the young softwood/hardwood whips come up through, and within ten years you've got a stand of wood that's ready to be thinned out again, to clean out the junk and let the good wood grow up into profitable timber again.
On the West coast, as I understand it, replanting is more important, since many of the species won't grow from seed UNLESS there has been a forest fire.
The United States is also more forested now than it has been in a hundred years, since so much land formerly cleared for agriculture has grown back as forest. If you could look at Google Earth imagery of New England from 1900 and today, the difference would be astounding.
Clear cutting absolutely did happen in the US. Take a flight over the Pacific Northwest and you can clearly see the effect decades later. Get out into remote areas and you can also see just how stark selective cutting is compared to a pristine landscape.
Second growth is only a step in the ecological process of producing a mature forest. Most of the east coast's regrowth is not representative of the original species, though it is often farther along in the process compared to the west coast. These places take multiple centuries to come back to their former pristine state.
Why does it take so long? Plant species are sensitive to available light and moisture. Canopies regulate this on the ground, but also rely on established plants for their development. Immature, modified or non-existent canopies cannot support the same life.
Selective cutting modifies the canopy. Established growth underneath does not survive, even if it is still alive when the crew goes home. When the canopy recovers in a single century the lower plants can thrive once again.
Recent research has been showing that native americans shaped their forests with fire. It's entirely possible that many of the north american forests intentional human caused fires as part of their normal cycle.
I think that's a combination of high winds and young growth. If it is young growth, it's actually illustrating what the article is describing, the young growth trees are young, but not at young s they should be, and they bridge the gap between the undergrowth and canopy. Once the canopy catches in a dense forest, there's a real problem, but a dense forest with undergrowth only on file may be a mild, slow moving (since the wind may be mostly blocked) fire.
This varies greatly by region, land use, and weather patterns. In some places and years, humans dominate; others, lightning. Because humans tend to start more fires near cities, campgrounds, and other accessible areas, those fires tend to be contained or extinguished quickly. Lightning starts tend to be on ridgelines, near peaks, and in other remote areas that are difficult to reach. Many of the big, long-burning fires are lightning starts, but they also tend to threaten fewer structures. Obviously there are exceptions all around.
I was actually thinking this as well. Higher insurance premiums for homes that are not rated to far exceed what should in practice be possible to experience in a hurricane or fire should be the norm. Actually, my guess is this is coming, as soon as the actuarial tables adjust to the new climate reality (barring political meddling to suppress normal market forces).
As for floods... I dunno, maybe insurance requiring some portion of the house that is higher than the flood plain and that the house is not in danger of becoming unmoored for any sort of sane rates. I imagine that would make housing in places way under the flood plane or that face both floods and hurricanes expensive to build in, which is the point.
"Actuarial tables" are really only used to price life insurance.
Property/Casualty insurance (auto, home, work comp, etc.) are priced by analyzing recent loss experience, then trending loss costs forward (as medical costs & replacement costs go up over time).
Hazards that are infrequent and spatially-correlated (hurricane, tornado/hail, fire) are often priced by using simulations, which take into account the nature of the event, engineering simulations, and insurance policy terms.
Flood insurance is incredibly politicized, as it's handled at the federal level. Floods are typically considered an "uninsurable event" given that if you live in a flood plan, there's a high likelihood that you'll have a loss due to flood--less of an "if" than a "when".
Flood insurance is sold & claims are handled by insurance companies, but it is effectively reinsured 100% by the federal government. Actuarial studies have show the premiums to be highly inadequate, but there has been legislation that aims to reduce that inadequacy.
What I suspected, and what you hint at, is that the insurance market isn't all that efficient in some areas. In some cases because there's limited information, in which case the only way to increase market efficiency is to do more research (which is so open ended it's impossible to know when you're doing "enough"), or to pad the results to account for errors. In other cases it's because there's been too much government interference, or the interference has had unintended side effects (I believe in market interference, I just believe it should almost always be to increase efficiency, where all to often our efforts are to subsidize a segment and that has too many follow-on consequences). Requiring insurance in specific areas might help this.
Is it possible to clear enough brush/trees from around your house that the chance of it catching on fire is small? I've always wondered this, but I've never seen this issue addressed anywhere. Thanks.
EDIT: of course, if your house was left standing in the middle of a fire wasteland, you might want to live there anymore.
Yes, it is possible to make fire-breaks where the fire can be handled.
They have to be very large (and therefore expensive. Both in terms of land and in terms of maintenance) to protect your house against a mega fire though.
Of course, they could be created in preventative fashion to limit the fires so that the size of the forest fires is limited.
While it would have to be "large" for a "mega fire," there are a lot of small and inexpensive things you can do to help protect your home. Things like removing any shurbs around your house are very useful. Won't necessarily save your house, but it's a good start.
Yes it is, and it's actually pretty easy. There are many ways to reduce the chance of a fire hitting your actual living structure and out west there actually are landscaping firms that specialize in doing that. Unfortunately many older homes/properties aren't set up for this so that's when it can get expensive.
Source: I'm a wildland fire fighter. Have seen awesome and terrible uses of fireproofing property.
>I've been saying for years now that if you live in a potential burn area, know where your irreplaceables are, carry fire insurance, evacuate and LET IT BURN.
If people did that, you couldn't buy fire insurance any more.
Let's look more positively at the problem. Use robots to fight fires. Use robots to manage fuel stocks. Learn more about firefighting as a species. I think we can get a lot better at fighting fires than we are right now.
I was under the impression that it was part of a regular fire safety program in all public schools (mentioned once at the very least) -- they're known as controlled burns[1].
Prescribed burning[2] has been present in forest fire management for centuries across the world, a practice which was largely discontinued in the US (and recently re-introduced).
NIMBY folks don't care for it because of the risk of outbreak (of which is minimal as those doing it are knowledgeable and it is done in a generally controlled environment) and the fact that it is unsightly and that minor smoke inhalation is unpleasant.
It's not a matter of letting small fires burn but rather continuing the time-honored tradition of proper forestry management. As mentioned, the US Forest Service discontinued this practice after enacting a policy of suppressing all fires.
I'm not even going to get into the issue of civilization encroaching upon nature and the risk surrounding it. Wildfires that consume large percentages of a given state (well above 20% in some cases) are far less forgiving than coyotes and brown bears.
Fukuyama's recent book Political Order and Political Decay goes into some detail on the forest service, from its origins as a model of a modern effective government agency in the Progressive era to one captured by special interests and turned ineffective by conflicting mandates from congress.
This article has an innocence that seems almost willfully blind. They write:
"But assiduous firefighting is also to blame."
They don't spend much time talking about the most obvious force that drives the "assiduous firefighting". The expansion of the suburbs have pushed human habitation out into what used to be the middle of a forest. Also, the increased popularity of what is sometimes referred to as "country living" but which is really a form of low density suburban living, has added to the trend.
The point is, areas that used to be free of humans now have a bunch of $1.2 million dollar homes. And thus you have an affluent demographic that is pushing hard for "assiduous firefighting". And that trend will continue so long as the suburbs continue to expand, which will likely be a long time.
The article has a tone that suggests policy makers are simply making an mistake by engaging in "assiduous firefighting". Overlooking the political forces that drive this make it difficult to understand why it is difficult to stop.
Tangentially related: it's almost a "capitalism vs. nature" problem.
We see it in SF/SV even today. Hundreds (thousands?) of companies are hiring employees and moving them into a resource starved state because it's good for their growing startups.
We need some rule like: if your company hires someone and moves them to California for employment, your company should pay to relocate 2 to 5 families (voluntarily) outside of California.
I wonder why this was downvoted? I'm stating what should be obvious to everyone. As the human habitation moves deeper into the woods, there is an increase in the political motivation to engage in "assiduous firefighting".
There's a sector of the HN demographic that won't be satisfied until we're all living in a three-dimensional urban matrix of human-sized chicken coops. Many other HN readers aspire to something bigger and better than that, and the tone of your post may have sounded hostile to some of them.
That's not necessarily a good excuse for whacking the downvote arrow, but there are other excuses that are good ones, such as the ridiculously poor UI design of said arrows that make it too easy to hit the wrong one, combined with the Slashdot-era inability to correct an accidental moderation.
Anyone else notice the date on this article is wrong ? I first expected this to be something about 9/11. I read the date to see when it was published, and it is from tomorrow!
I grew up where two very large fires happened in AZ, the Rodeo-Chediski fire and the Wallow, and I have spent quite a bit of time in those forests, as has my grandfather who was a logger in the area in the 70's. My takeaway is that the forest service spent too much time listening to freshly degreed environmentalists and not enough time listening to locals who know the forest, and have created unintended consequences of huge fires through their insistence against thinning of forests, especially after the pine beetle infestation got crazy. All the old loggers, including my grandfather, were saying we needed to be thinning the forest out, because they were interrupting the normal natural cycle of forest burn through lighting, etc, and by doing preburns too small. I admit I didn't believe he was right, until the fire happened and we all realized that it was mismanagement by the BLM and Forest Service that caused the unnecessary level of devastation.
It makes me wonder if the same thing is happening in other forest areas in the west.
On a side note, I am wondering how much of the lack of moisture is due to unintended consequences of cloud seeding in other areas. Every year I can remember there has been less and less snowfall, which is critical for forests health in the summer, even during the 90's El-Nino.
Well you're not wrong actually. The Forest Service took over fire management for most of the country in the early 1900's (1910 I think?) and did what fire fighters do best - put fires out. Today we understand that just putting the fire out isn't always the best long term course of action though...
I will say that we are seeing hotter and drier fire seasons than before. While this isn't entirely a result of the lack of moisture, it definitely doesn't help.
How about just stop building houses near places where they're going to light on fire? And stop building them on floodplains while we're at it. Or anywhere else that, you know, is a bloody stupid place to put a house. It's not like there's no room to put them in a more sensible place. If you know it's not just possible but likely that the house will be seriously damaged or destroyed within ten years or so, it's probably best not to build it.
There are good reasons to build in some of the areas that are prone to disasters. Much of the west coast is fault lines, but there are extremely lucrative ports there as well.
I think the real problem is that the people are bad at planning for things that happen on the timescale of many types of disasters, so we need to combat this deficiency. E.g. Requiring insurance for disaster areas over a certain level, pseudo-pooling by level to increase cost for worse areas, etc.
The big problem is the existing populace, which may be priced out of their homes. You could probably ameliorate those problems by only enforcing the new requirements on sale/inheritance of existing homes or new buildings. Eventually the market will adjust.
Say I build a house in a town near a forest in Idaho. Now, there are 20,000,000 acres of national forest in Idaho of which 200,000 are currently burning. So only 1% of the forest is burning and mostly in remote locations in which there are no roads. Even if one of the fires happens to be near me, I am not too worried: I have a metal roof and a fuel-free buffer zone around the house. Additionally, the local fire department has my back.
This is a one-time event for me, because the same forest won't burn again in my lifetime. The chance of my house being destroyed by a wildfire in any ten-year period is practically zero.
Note that high deserts also burn, and the wind moves those fires along at a frightening pace. Forest and desert are pretty much the only choices in places like Idaho or Montana.
What are everyone's thoughts on natural disasters being overall beneficial for the environment?
Just because forest fires occur naturally, and would spread naturally without human intervention, does that necessarily mean they are beneficial for the earth?
If humans didn't try to put out forest fires, and perhaps by chance many lightning strikes caused fires all across the northern west coast within a small timeframe, would this still be a net positive for the ecosytem?
Well, fires have been happening for a long time, so long that some species have adapted to it (pine cones only opening up and releasing seeds when exposed to high heat being one of them), so I can only assume that the ecosystem has learned to deal with it.
Usually we define "good" for the environment to be the state it would be in without human interference.
The Great Oxygenation wiped out most life on Earth, which sounds like a bad thing. But clearing out so many species leaves the way for an evolutionary boom to fill all the new niches. So... we can't really even say that mass extinctions are bad.
What and where people choose to build in a given environment is a curiosity. I've looked at property east of the Cascades over the years. Probably never happen as I definitely feel the pull of the ocean more.
We can't perfectly suppress fire on a natural landscape. And the act of trying increases the risk that when a fire does start it will become huge and uncontrollable because small trees and forest undergrowth—which would have burned in a small fire if we’d not suppressed them--act as kindling that speeds the ignition of mature trees.
More frequent removals of biomass through controlled burns and selective timber harvest can reduce the risk that a hugely catastrophic wildfire occurs. Hotter and bigger fires consume disproportionately more carbon than a series of "normal" fires, particularly in the soil. So more regular and controlled burns improve the landscape's ability to act as a greenhouse gas sink.
I worked with a forester in Oregon on this issue (at the time my work was focused on greenhouse gas accounting). It all gets a lot more complicated and messy, but there's good progress going on right now to try to move toward a more sensible fire management regime rather than the pure suppression. It's also better for animal habitat and human safety.
This has been a problem in Malibu, California for some time now. The issue there is that controlled burns are necessary, but there is chronic NIMBYism due to the fact that the controlled burns result in a charred, ugly landscape. [1]
If I recall correctly, California was actually on fire when the first settlers sailed up along the coast. The native population used to burn the coast annually.
It's a tremendous cost (both financial, and the lives of firefighters lost) to support housing development in an area that's not really suited for it.
And they are deeply committed to their flood defence infrastructure. They even have a democratically elected regional government dealing only with this. [1]
They are also moving houses out of the flood plain to make it work. The culture in the U.S. Would make that really hard I think. Lots to read about it here. http://www.dutchwatersector.com
The earth isn't suitable for human habitation. We spent unimaginable amounts of lives and created tons of suffering to create the world we now inhabited. It seems, to me, odd to say enough is enough when a few houses are in danger of burning out.
An acquaintance working on her forestry PhD told this story more like: some species are adapted to produce forest fires. Pines lay down beds of dry needle and produce compounds that promote flammability. This is their strategy for getting ahead. She also described an interspecies war to claim territory: pines trying to make more fire to burn out their competition, oaks promoting damp and moisture to drown out theirs.
In the future when we all live in the sky, a burning mountain will be a great spectacle that we travel to see. "It's fire season, I'm going north to catch the show this week."
I was shown a pine cone once that snapped open when burned, enabling its seeds to pop out. It was explained to me that fire was a necessary part of the tree's lifecycle, and that this is why logging isn't a suitable substitute for fires.
As people have stated here, the forests need to burn. Ponderosa Pine, which covers a lot of the Western U.S., burns at a cycle between 5-25 years. [1]
However, we could and already do, control the natural process this through prescribed burns. The issue is the federal government is appropriating less funds to the Department of the Interior and Forest Service. In fact 2016 will represent, "a decrease of $246 million below the fiscal year 2015." [2] Climate change could potentially shorten these life cycles. We definitely need to spend more to ensure safety and survival of homes and the forest.
The biggest problem has been reducing the ladder fuel (underbrush etc). The fuels dept is notoriously understaffed and underfunded for national forest service. On top of his, it's difficult to convince locals to deal with lots of controlled burns in winter and spring.
Logging practices have gotten better, especially with dispersed thinning, but my gut is hat climate change is the real culprit.
Also, lodge pole pine is becoming more dominant in the PNW, and we're losing more fire resistant (and dependent) trees like ponderosa. Lodge pole grows like a weed and burns like hay.
Couple this with an antiquated federal service entirely dependent on chain of command that fights every year to preserve operations and their career posts and you get one of the most wasteful inefficient services in U.S. Govt.
Source: I was a forest firefighter and left after being fed up w the bureaucracy. So take my cynicism w a grain of salt.
> my gut is hat climate change is the real culprit.
Whether or not this particular incident is caused by it, climate change is and will create massive costs for society, from forest fires, to coastal cities flooding, to water and food shortages, to all the associated mitigations and social consequences (wars, starvation, migrations, etc.). Who should pay for all of it? These are massive externalities dumped on the public by the fossil fuel industry and, to be fair, by the very many users of fossil fuel, including me. However, I didn't conduct a propaganda campaign that has turned a problem into this catastrophe.
Regarding this particular situation: I'm not sure a particular fire can be directly linked to climate change. Climate change will make some places wetter, some drier, some warmer, some cooler. The average temperature globally is increasing, but that's an average over a huge area (also, does someone happen to know about humidity and rainfall?).
Def agree that it's more complicated but PNWhas record dryness and heat last five years. An the level tho you're right and it warrants more inspection than my cursory gut check.
Reminds me of the joke that if a forest firefighter woke up in the middle of the night and saw his house was on fire, he would go light his neighbor's house on fire to fight it.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadI got a "YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR ARTICLE LIMIT" banner after the first paragraph, but the banner looked so much like all the other crap on the site that I had looked over it. I spent 2 entire minutes figuring out where the hell the rest of the article was.
I think paywalls are a pretty good idea so no comment there, but if you want people to sign up, at least make sure the place is otherwise void of mess so people can find the "buy" button.
btw - The Economist has had poor business execution for at least the last 2 decades - a nice irony given how they like to lecture others on how to run things.
IIRC, they are one of the most successful magazines in the world, with rapidly growing readership and revenue.
My experience (and others' I know) of buying subscriptions has been a pain - mail sent to totally incorrect address, also time between signing up and delivery being many weeks.
Their on-line subscription used to allow many tens of people to use 1 account, simultaneously (I cannot be sure whether this was a clever way to increase readership&advertising revenue, or whether their systems didn't detect multiple simultaneous logins from different countries on 1 account).
It is possible to have a fine product, but poor execution on the business/commercial side. e.g. many UK football clubs have historically had a fine product (rights to view football matches etc) but have failed to make the most of it in a business sense. Some have been commercially successful, despite squandering income opportunities.
But as this article alludes to, it has to burn. It does naturally. We have to let go - we are wasting valuable resources to fight these fires. People have _died_ fighting these fires. And for what? So your house doesn't burn down?
I'm sorry, but a fire is typically a slow-moving natural disaster. It rarely strikes without a fair warning. I've been saying for years now that if you live in a potential burn area, know where your irreplaceables are, carry fire insurance, evacuate and LET IT BURN.
We can't keep fighting nature and winning.
All of the premium non-hurricane, non-forest land, is taken already by rich people. Isn't it subsidising rich people if we allow them to live on the best land, while others contributing to society elsewhere observe no benefit?
I guess if you ignore the entire midwest?
Almost every region comes with its own set of possible natural disasters. Maybe we are better off pooling everything and just have natural disaster insurance that covers fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, blizzard, and so on.
I'm not saying home insurance needs to be the same cost for everyone, but the current situation of specialized policies that vary house to house in each region is overly complex. Plus climate change is changing the risk profile for everyone and the results of which are not yet clearly understood by climate scientists let alone random homeowners.
I actually think it's not complex enough. How else do you accurately price natural disasters into existing homes, whose ownership is often measured in decades? I think any area with a chance over a certain percent of a natural disaster that could cause catastrophic loss of property should require insurance, and the insurance cost should be as accurate as possible to the reality of living in that location.
10. southeast michigan*
9. denver colorado
8. chicago illinois*
7. allentown pennsylvania* (actually east, not midwest)
6. dayton ohio*
5. bethesda maryland
4. buffalo new york
3. akron ohio*
2. cleveland ohio*
1. syracuse new york
Hmm, maybe you're thinking of the central US? also known as 'tornado alley'?
The definition of various 'areas' of the US are ill defined, but its clear, at least from my experience living in the midwest and having never experienced a single disaster in the 25 years I've been here, that the midwest is definitely the safest from natural disasters.
It is also worth noting that almost all of the cities listed are heavily impacted by snow which it doesn't sound like it was factored in to the ranking. Dealing with large snowfalls have a huge costs although it might not be factored in to normal home insurance since there is generally minimal property damage. It might be interesting to see a cost comparison between dealing with large snowfalls and other less frequent but more damaging weather phenomena like hurricanes or tornadoes.
Finally, Ohio certainly sees less tornadoes than most of the midwest, but it still receives a lot compared to the western US. Here is a nice visual summary of recorded tornadoes [1]. This one [2] is of especial interest and shows all tornadoes that have caused $50+ million in damage which would be important when talking about insurance. Tornado alley certainly gets more tornadoes, but Ohio is right up with them in terms of damage mainly due to the comparative development of the various areas.
[1] - http://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2012/07/interactive-tornado-t...
[2] - http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HlfovbQeMvg/UBFIgq0rAPI/AAAAAAAABP...
As for ohio, I count 6 tornados on there, maybe 7? (i might be reading it wrong)
since 1950?
I'd say thats pretty low risk.
How many earthquakes have we had in that time?
How many hurricanes have caused billions of damage in that time? Floods/draught/etc
> which it doesn't sound like it was factored in to the ranking.
I dont think it was, it was ranked by natural disasters - so unless its a major blizzard it probably wouldnt be measured. (oh they probably didn't include hail either, which is uncommon, but more damaging to property)
I also dont think snow is on the same level as a natural disaster from an insurance risk perspective, but it likely results in greater or at least similar fatalities overall so i think its a fair point.
I'm not arguing the midwest is immune to all danger, i'm only saying living there puts you at lower risk of being affected by a natural disaster - /and/ - that the land there isn't already owned by 'rich people' (to take us back to why i commented in the first place)
Also - i wish that tornado map was interactive, would be great to see more of the filters
Doing the math, it's pretty easy to guess that all that midwestern land is probably owned by "rich people", too.
I put that in scare quotes because there is some element of circularity involved. If you own 120 acres of cornfields, you have over $500k worth of property. So do you own the land because you're rich, or are you rich because you own the land?
Now do that math with land values in Detroit.
I think its well accepted that land values are generally quite higher on both coasts than the midwest. Agricultural land values are not very useful for estimating the cost of residential land
Edit:removed some snark
Ted Turner didn't get to own 2M acres of land by buying in Atlanta. Much of that is bison ranches.
There are a lot of people out there that own no more than 0.25 acre, which is pledged as security for a mortgage.
If you own land outright, free of liens and mortgages, whether rural or urban or in between, you're already way ahead of most people. You may not be actual rich, but "rich" by comparison with your neighbors.
Peering under the covers of agribusiness in the U.S. was somewhat enlightening. It would appear that one should not attempt a farming start-up without at least $1M in the bank, and you will only get about an 8% return on it per year, on average. Small farms simply do not make money; you cannot run a small farm as your sole source of income and expect to earn the equivalent of minimum wage.
So the natural conclusion I reached from my cursory research is that the vast majority of raw acreage in the U.S. is probably owned by investment trusts, who lease it for farming, mining, ranching, and logging, to people who barely earn a profit, and mostly just immediately spend 70% of everything they earn on expenses.
There's a good reason why YCombinator invests in tech start-ups instead of plows and cows.
It is interesting that some of the poorest, white-trash areas of the country are the safest. At least in Maine, the only natural disaster I can remember is the ice storm of 98, which, aside from knocking out power for a week, mostly amounted to an extra week of school vacation that winter.
[0] http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/291-federal-lands-in-the-us
That's a weird definition for "natural" you're using. I think you mean something more like "typical". Unless you're making a theological point, an "act of God" is quite literally as natural (in the sense of un-artificial) as you can get.
But the grandparent's point was economic. Disaster insurance can't work: the whole idea behind insurance is that "bad stuff" happens rarely to some people, so everyone pools money together to pay for the few who actually needed. Disasters happen broadly, and to everyone who needs it in the affected area. A "correct" insurance scheme there would be tantamount to everyone having to just save money on their own, there's no efficiency. And of course in practice the insurance companies cheat and don't save enough, so people don't actually get paid.
Or changing conditions throw off their actuarial tables, making the company insolvent when reality intercedes. Those changes could be as obvious (at this stage) as climate change, or as subtle as a long-standing practice of preventing forest fires, which while seemingly preventing property loss to fire is actually creating an unstable system which has the capability for much larger destruction than the typical fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God
As a society, we cannot ignore the cost of the "Act of God" level disasters when summing up the cost of said disaster. If an insurance companies might be able to avoid paying out on a claim doesn't mean property (or lives) did not get lost.
In my mind the issue is pretty simple: if you buy a house in a wild-fire prone area, you should expect a wildfire at some point. Whether or not you want to prepare by a) purchasing insurance or b) wild-fire proofing your house is your prerogative. If you're not willing to take/mitigate the risk, then live somewhere else.
Life insurance spreads out risk over a large span of time for the same person. Life insurers have to be more careful. They have to invest the premiums wisely, so that they will have exactly enough cash on hand to pay out the amount of the policy on the expected date it comes due (along with some profit). If the person dies earlier than expected, they could lose money. If the person dies later, they could get more profit. Furthermore, if the investment market is unexpectedly good or bad, that affects the insurer's ability to pay the benefit. Life insurers can rely on the fact that while all people eventually die, they don't all croak at once. There's actually a predictable rate, so if you get enough people to buy policies, you're never paying out more than you take in.
Disaster insurance is more like life insurance, but even harder to pull off, because all those benefits are probably going to be paid at exactly the same time. So what insurers have to do is take that gigantic, elephant-choking payout and let each underwriter take a little bite of it, until it's all accounted for. They're spreading the risk over multiple people, long periods of time, and multiple investors. And even so, thanks to the fact that it is essentially an enforced savings scheme, a big enough disaster would be a shock to the financial markets.
But there's no way around that. If a storm destroys one of your windows, you're going to be buying a new window, instead of some other thing that you may have wanted more. If it destroys your whole town, a lot of money is going to shift from savings and investments into construction.
There is some advantage to having disaster insurance. First off, ordinary people are absolutely horrible at reasonably judging risks. Second, we are also pretty bad at compartmentalizing our savings and investments. If you have a 100-Year Flood fund, and a Yellowstone Goes Kablooie fund, and a Bad Tornado Season fund, and your grocery budget stands at $20 for this month, would you have the fortitude to eat nothing but beans and rice for four weeks? And third, institutional investors manage money better than a lot of individuals, and can take better advantage of the tax laws. It isn't hard to just dump everything into the Fideliguard Some of Everything Index Fund, but some people still put all their money in an ordinary commercial bank savings account, where the interest doesn't even cover the monthly service fees, but it still gets taxed.
But as you say, a lot of those advantages can disappear to just one bad actor in the insurance company trying to cheat a little for some personal gain. The best thing people can do to manage disasters is to be aware of their own risks, and to plan ahead only for those scenarios that have a reasonable likelihood of occurring.
there isn't a ton of flood preventation infrastructure that has been built with tax money.
All flood prevention infrastructure outside of the dirt berm at the local pond was built with tax money. Been to, say, New Orleans recently?
Societies subsidize people who live in flood plains because of agriculture, infrastructure and logistics. Essentially, we get far more OUT of people living in MOST flood plains than we put in with respect to subsidies.
Consider MOST of the coastal cities. We, obviously, get WAY more OUT of Houston, Galveston and New Orleans, for example, than we put in. Those three ports are enormously important to us. If they disappeared tomorrow, you would discover why they were important the hard way.
Similarly for people living in midwestern flood plains. We will typically get far more out of them than we put in. Try feeding the world, with currently known agricultural technology, while not using any land in flood plains and you'll see what I mean. Even if you could somehow manage to do it... and I don't think you could.... but even if you could, you would cause enormous damage to the ecological tapestry of the continent. You would have to move MATERIAL amounts of water and soil at a minimum. It's best to subsidize the farmers to do what they do and make sure they're not disturbed in their endeavors. And, yes, many of those farmers and agribusinesses will be in flood plains.
Now I'm not saying ALL flood plains in the midwest or on the coast are critical infrastructure. New York, Houston and New Orleans are far more critical to our survival than... say... Miami, Myrtle Beach or Malibu. So obviously, I'm not saying that ALL port cities or ALL midwestern flood plains are critical. But there are definitely some places in this nation that merit sizable subsidies to keep people living and working there. It's the nature of the beast when you're talking about engineering an empire.
The efficient thing to do is end the subsidy, and have all the less valuable activities whose benefits don't exceed the costs relocate or cease.
I'm sure other people have thought this through much better than what I just said. But it seems to me to be a reasonable argument.
If your goal is people living in flood zones, you should subsidize living in flood zones (e.g. by insuring it, which we also do).
We need an answer to the latter question in this case, not the former. And one is readily at hand: the political interest of those who live in flood zones. Maybe there's some other justification, but I'll confess I'm skeptical that this outcome is globally utility maximizing relative to alternative policies.
The market doesn't always know what is right. To be more specific: the market is short-sighted and greedy, and can self-destruct an economy if left unregulated. We need to subsidize activities that have large costs in the short term, but return more over the long run to society. Or else they won't happen.
State funded 'generic' scholarships simply rise the cost of tuition. Good state schools are a much better use of funds as they drive down for profit education costs to be cost competitive. Schools can easily offer scholarships at minimal costs as a form of price discrimination, but public scholarships tend to simply result in administrative bloat.
Should we discontinue subsidies for solar energy companies?
Yes, instead we should tax CO2 production instead of subsidizing two industry's. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
How about the billions in R&D tax subsidies that we give to pharmaceutical/industrial/healthcare companies each year to develop new drugs, treatments, and machinery?
These should also be stopped, it's fine to fund public R&D but private R&D has terrible ROI. Drug companies spend more on advertising than R&D and really don't need help. For a solid example, the US could have a 10 year strategic food reserve for 1/10th the cost of current agro subsidies that directly result in massive health issues.
PS I agree that markets are often inefficient, but subsidies then to be horrible ways to correct them. Taxes tend to be much more efficient.
I won't address your specific points as everyone has different opinions on policy, but no one has the data to rigorously defend their opinions.
I simply want to refute the notion that we can allow free markets to allocate all resources within the economy.
Taxes are much more scalable than subsidies. AKA if A is better for society than B but B is cheaper to produce then taxing B can balance things fairly easily with consumers paying society for the external costs. But, subsidizing A is an unbound cost, adds administrative overhead, and promotes consumption of A and or B.
The downsides of Taxes is there often regressive, but for something like alcohol, pollution, or speeding societal costs are often independent from a persons net worth.
Sure, let me count them... OMG "It's Over 9000!!!"
PS: Ask a dumb question... http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/It's_Over_9000!
If you want more R&D, you should subsidize R&D.
If you want more people living in burn zones, you should subsidize living in burn zones.
I think I join most Americans in saying that I'd rather more people be educated, I'd rather have more R&D, and I wouldn't rather more people live in burn zones.
There are ways to mitigate the risks of living in a flood plain while still reaping the benefits.
http://realestate.heraldtribune.com/2014/02/15/bubil-facing-...
What stood out, literally, was one farm house high and dry that had been built on a bulldozed mound.
http://www.concretethinker.com/solutions/Disaster-Resistance...
Some friends of mine built a house this way in Montana, and the firefighters told them that if all Montanans built their wilderness homes that way, their job would be a lot easier.
You can find a lot of information on this by googling for "fire resistant home".
Quick and dirty approach is to use a controlled burn to clear brush near property and then just use a sprinkler system.
Granted these are far from 100% effective, but even a 50/50 shot at saving a property is worth a fair amount of effort.
In the US, we are succeeding in reducing the rate of growth in CO2 emission. We're not yet succeeding in reducing total gases. We'd be a lot more successful if we stopped subsidizing the production and consumption of oil and coal. In 2013, the IEA estimates US$548 billion (annually) of global subsidy to fossil fuel. And the IMF calculates that including external costs (pollution), US$5.3 trillion of subsidy in 2015.
The article says that the portion of the budget dedicated to fighting fires keeps increasing, giving less money to land management decided to prevent a lot of the fires we are fighting. Seems to me that continuing on this path will just result in ever increasing costs. We have to let it burn, on our terms.
Secondly, the question was "why don't they thin things out". Not "why don't we let them thin things out". Implying a change to normal behavior.
Thinning is more expensive and difficult than clear cutting, which is why we don't do it often.
Typically, the way you would cut a piece of land is by selectively cutting out the species and grades of lumber that are actually worth money. So one winter you go in and cut the big, high-quality pine, or spruce and fir for saw logs. Another season you might cut out the high-quality veneer-grade hardwood trees. Of course, when you do this, you would also cut a bunch of the junk that is never going to grow into profitable timber, and sell that as pulpwood for making paper, or low-quality logs for making pallets, or sell it as firewood. If you selectively cut like this, it's not particularly difficult to rotate through a series of stands and continue to harvest them indefinitely, and you maintain a variable-age forest that sustains the local wildlife, to boot.
At least on the East coast, it's not really necessary to replant cut sections, even if you do go in and clear cut them, since there is so much residual seed on the ground already, and many of the species will even sprout again from stump. You go through a short cycle of black/raspberries and other scrub growth to fix the soil, then the young softwood/hardwood whips come up through, and within ten years you've got a stand of wood that's ready to be thinned out again, to clean out the junk and let the good wood grow up into profitable timber again.
On the West coast, as I understand it, replanting is more important, since many of the species won't grow from seed UNLESS there has been a forest fire.
The United States is also more forested now than it has been in a hundred years, since so much land formerly cleared for agriculture has grown back as forest. If you could look at Google Earth imagery of New England from 1900 and today, the difference would be astounding.
Second growth is only a step in the ecological process of producing a mature forest. Most of the east coast's regrowth is not representative of the original species, though it is often farther along in the process compared to the west coast. These places take multiple centuries to come back to their former pristine state.
Why does it take so long? Plant species are sensitive to available light and moisture. Canopies regulate this on the ground, but also rely on established plants for their development. Immature, modified or non-existent canopies cannot support the same life.
Selective cutting modifies the canopy. Established growth underneath does not survive, even if it is still alive when the crew goes home. When the canopy recovers in a single century the lower plants can thrive once again.
On what do you base the statement that a fire is typically "slow-moving"? It can certainly be fast. Here's an example. [1]
[1] http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/09/the-speed-of-fire/
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire#Hu...
Does lightning stop happening if people are gone?
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01998581
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023043150045793833...
As for floods... I dunno, maybe insurance requiring some portion of the house that is higher than the flood plain and that the house is not in danger of becoming unmoored for any sort of sane rates. I imagine that would make housing in places way under the flood plane or that face both floods and hurricanes expensive to build in, which is the point.
Property/Casualty insurance (auto, home, work comp, etc.) are priced by analyzing recent loss experience, then trending loss costs forward (as medical costs & replacement costs go up over time).
Hazards that are infrequent and spatially-correlated (hurricane, tornado/hail, fire) are often priced by using simulations, which take into account the nature of the event, engineering simulations, and insurance policy terms.
Flood insurance is incredibly politicized, as it's handled at the federal level. Floods are typically considered an "uninsurable event" given that if you live in a flood plan, there's a high likelihood that you'll have a loss due to flood--less of an "if" than a "when".
Flood insurance is sold & claims are handled by insurance companies, but it is effectively reinsured 100% by the federal government. Actuarial studies have show the premiums to be highly inadequate, but there has been legislation that aims to reduce that inadequacy.
EDIT: of course, if your house was left standing in the middle of a fire wasteland, you might want to live there anymore.
They have to be very large (and therefore expensive. Both in terms of land and in terms of maintenance) to protect your house against a mega fire though.
Of course, they could be created in preventative fashion to limit the fires so that the size of the forest fires is limited.
Source: I'm a wildland fire fighter. Have seen awesome and terrible uses of fireproofing property.
If people did that, you couldn't buy fire insurance any more.
Let's look more positively at the problem. Use robots to fight fires. Use robots to manage fuel stocks. Learn more about firefighting as a species. I think we can get a lot better at fighting fires than we are right now.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing anything about it...
Prescribed burning[2] has been present in forest fire management for centuries across the world, a practice which was largely discontinued in the US (and recently re-introduced).
NIMBY folks don't care for it because of the risk of outbreak (of which is minimal as those doing it are knowledgeable and it is done in a generally controlled environment) and the fact that it is unsightly and that minor smoke inhalation is unpleasant.
It's not a matter of letting small fires burn but rather continuing the time-honored tradition of proper forestry management. As mentioned, the US Forest Service discontinued this practice after enacting a policy of suppressing all fires.
I'm not even going to get into the issue of civilization encroaching upon nature and the risk surrounding it. Wildfires that consume large percentages of a given state (well above 20% in some cases) are far less forgiving than coyotes and brown bears.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn
[2] http://bcwildfire.ca/prevention/PrescribedFire/
"But assiduous firefighting is also to blame."
They don't spend much time talking about the most obvious force that drives the "assiduous firefighting". The expansion of the suburbs have pushed human habitation out into what used to be the middle of a forest. Also, the increased popularity of what is sometimes referred to as "country living" but which is really a form of low density suburban living, has added to the trend.
The point is, areas that used to be free of humans now have a bunch of $1.2 million dollar homes. And thus you have an affluent demographic that is pushing hard for "assiduous firefighting". And that trend will continue so long as the suburbs continue to expand, which will likely be a long time.
The article has a tone that suggests policy makers are simply making an mistake by engaging in "assiduous firefighting". Overlooking the political forces that drive this make it difficult to understand why it is difficult to stop.
We see it in SF/SV even today. Hundreds (thousands?) of companies are hiring employees and moving them into a resource starved state because it's good for their growing startups.
We need some rule like: if your company hires someone and moves them to California for employment, your company should pay to relocate 2 to 5 families (voluntarily) outside of California.
That's not necessarily a good excuse for whacking the downvote arrow, but there are other excuses that are good ones, such as the ridiculously poor UI design of said arrows that make it too easy to hit the wrong one, combined with the Slashdot-era inability to correct an accidental moderation.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/covers/2015-09-10/ap-e...
Contrary to the URL, this 'America in Flames' article is for next week's issue (Sept 12-18).
It makes me wonder if the same thing is happening in other forest areas in the west.
On a side note, I am wondering how much of the lack of moisture is due to unintended consequences of cloud seeding in other areas. Every year I can remember there has been less and less snowfall, which is critical for forests health in the summer, even during the 90's El-Nino.
I will say that we are seeing hotter and drier fire seasons than before. While this isn't entirely a result of the lack of moisture, it definitely doesn't help.
Madness.
I think the real problem is that the people are bad at planning for things that happen on the timescale of many types of disasters, so we need to combat this deficiency. E.g. Requiring insurance for disaster areas over a certain level, pseudo-pooling by level to increase cost for worse areas, etc.
The big problem is the existing populace, which may be priced out of their homes. You could probably ameliorate those problems by only enforcing the new requirements on sale/inheritance of existing homes or new buildings. Eventually the market will adjust.
This is a one-time event for me, because the same forest won't burn again in my lifetime. The chance of my house being destroyed by a wildfire in any ten-year period is practically zero.
Note that high deserts also burn, and the wind moves those fires along at a frightening pace. Forest and desert are pretty much the only choices in places like Idaho or Montana.
Just because forest fires occur naturally, and would spread naturally without human intervention, does that necessarily mean they are beneficial for the earth?
If humans didn't try to put out forest fires, and perhaps by chance many lightning strikes caused fires all across the northern west coast within a small timeframe, would this still be a net positive for the ecosytem?
I don't know enough about the equilibrium.
The Great Oxygenation wiped out most life on Earth, which sounds like a bad thing. But clearing out so many species leaves the way for an evolutionary boom to fill all the new niches. So... we can't really even say that mass extinctions are bad.
If I ever built over there I figured I would build a house like this guy's house. http://inhabitat.com/this-concrete-dome-home-survived-a-wall...
More frequent removals of biomass through controlled burns and selective timber harvest can reduce the risk that a hugely catastrophic wildfire occurs. Hotter and bigger fires consume disproportionately more carbon than a series of "normal" fires, particularly in the soil. So more regular and controlled burns improve the landscape's ability to act as a greenhouse gas sink.
I worked with a forester in Oregon on this issue (at the time my work was focused on greenhouse gas accounting). It all gets a lot more complicated and messy, but there's good progress going on right now to try to move toward a more sensible fire management regime rather than the pure suppression. It's also better for animal habitat and human safety.
http://www.oregon.gov/ODF/BOARD/docs/2011_March/BOFATTCH_201...
If I recall correctly, California was actually on fire when the first settlers sailed up along the coast. The native population used to burn the coast annually.
It's a tremendous cost (both financial, and the lives of firefighters lost) to support housing development in an area that's not really suited for it.
1: http://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Fear-Angeles-Imagination-Disas...
Be it deserts, be it wildfires, be it floods – this is a huge issue, and just continuing to fight against nature is not easy.
Well, unless you are the dutch, but they can only keep their cities safe of floods because they keep floodplains for the rivers.
They are also moving houses out of the flood plain to make it work. The culture in the U.S. Would make that really hard I think. Lots to read about it here. http://www.dutchwatersector.com
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board#Netherlands
In the future when we all live in the sky, a burning mountain will be a great spectacle that we travel to see. "It's fire season, I'm going north to catch the show this week."
However, we could and already do, control the natural process this through prescribed burns. The issue is the federal government is appropriating less funds to the Department of the Interior and Forest Service. In fact 2016 will represent, "a decrease of $246 million below the fiscal year 2015." [2] Climate change could potentially shorten these life cycles. We definitely need to spend more to ensure safety and survival of homes and the forest.
[1]http://www.nps.gov/fire/wildland-fire/learning-center/fire-i... [2] http://appropriations.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Doc...
Logging practices have gotten better, especially with dispersed thinning, but my gut is hat climate change is the real culprit.
Also, lodge pole pine is becoming more dominant in the PNW, and we're losing more fire resistant (and dependent) trees like ponderosa. Lodge pole grows like a weed and burns like hay.
Couple this with an antiquated federal service entirely dependent on chain of command that fights every year to preserve operations and their career posts and you get one of the most wasteful inefficient services in U.S. Govt.
Source: I was a forest firefighter and left after being fed up w the bureaucracy. So take my cynicism w a grain of salt.
Whether or not this particular incident is caused by it, climate change is and will create massive costs for society, from forest fires, to coastal cities flooding, to water and food shortages, to all the associated mitigations and social consequences (wars, starvation, migrations, etc.). Who should pay for all of it? These are massive externalities dumped on the public by the fossil fuel industry and, to be fair, by the very many users of fossil fuel, including me. However, I didn't conduct a propaganda campaign that has turned a problem into this catastrophe.
Regarding this particular situation: I'm not sure a particular fire can be directly linked to climate change. Climate change will make some places wetter, some drier, some warmer, some cooler. The average temperature globally is increasing, but that's an average over a huge area (also, does someone happen to know about humidity and rainfall?).