⚡ Brutal 2021 western fire season plus grid brownouts

“I think what we're realizing is the market now is so convinced that global warming is real and you can't deny it, that we just can't insure for it. Therefore, we're going to have to make serious societal changes.”

“I co-founded an insurance company called OTT Risk. And we've been trying to build models and price this kind of insurance, climate insurance ... I think what it means is that climate change is going to ravage suburbs and it's going to ravage these sort of like far-flung communities because nobody's going to want to step in there and ensure the parametric risk”

“right now in Marin County in California, it's nearly impossible to get fire insurance. This is becoming a predominant factor in California, particularly in all the areas with lots of forest land. There's 100 million acres of forest land in California. If a trillion dollars of real estate is actually exposed to fires and you can't get fire insurance, ask yourselves the question, what's going to happen when hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate literally goes up in smoke or gets sold off? ... And ultimately the federal government is going to have these like Katrina events four or five times a year that we're going to be underwriting losses for people's real estate that's valued in a way that doesn't account for the effects of climate change. This is the massive shift in economic value that we're going to, someone's going to have to pay for over the next decade. And this is just the beginning of it all is my strong belief.”

“And so drought conditions have existed for a long time. Has climate change amplified that and made it worse? Yes. But this is entirely foreseeable. ... The problem for him is that fire season now starts in August. And so, we could be in the middle of fire season when this recall election happens.”

“But what matters most is that the moisture conditions in our forest land is lower than we've ever seen at this time of year in history. ... So we're going to have more power demand, we have less power available, we have extremely dry forests. ... And so this is setting us up for a number of possible disasters this year.”

“We are going to have a terrible fire season. There's going to be brownouts probably throughout a lot of the western states. What played out in Texas that affected folks a few months ago, I think will some version of that will happen in many places in the US.”

“And Friedberg's right that we needed much more aggressive forest management. It's not just climate change. It's also forest management. We don't do it in California anymore. And so I think we are in for a really hellish fire season.”

“Well, we are at risk more than ever, right? So we're entering June. So as of June 1st, the California snowpack is down to 0% of normal. That's never happened before. So it's the lowest it's ever been. There is absolutely like no snowpack in the entire Sierra and the entire state. 40% of the state is in a state of extreme drought right now.”