Comment by tobyhinloopen 3 months ago
American, living in area prone to natural disasters: "Is the WHOLE WORLD becoming uninsurable?"
The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.
Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and some wind/debris damage exactly like the blown over trees you mention.
Houses generally aren't destroyed by hurricanes in the sense of "the storm literally ripped them up", they're made uninhabitable by storm surges (flood).
The scary ones are tornados.
And tornados do genuinely fuck shit up. Even in those "enlightened" parts of the world you think have proper building regulations. If you're interested, go look at the recaps of tornado damage where they hit Europe here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_tornadoes_and...
Note the number of homes destroyed and people killed - plenty of both, even in those countries that prefer brick/concrete homes.
Hurricanes throw branches. Tornados throw cars.
Tornadoes are quite a bit less common outside of North America, and especially the US. Some of that comes down to the absence of people in the places where tornadoes occur, so there's no one there to report them.
The Tornado Archive (https://tornadoarchive.com/) has a pretty well executed map to illustrate that. They report that between 2011 and 2021 (just the dates I punched in, so its possible the actual ratio is a bit different from that), the world saw ~20,000 reported tornadoes. North America reported 12,000 of them.
So its not just that Americans maybe don't know how to build tornado resistant structures. Its that the US and Canada's per-capita tornado rate is quite a bit higher than the rest of the world.
Also, the list of tornadoes the GP refers to in Europe are mostly F0-F2 severity. These don't often cause high fatalities and injuries in the US either (on par with what's reported there). The problem is that tornadoes in the US Midwest and Southeast are often in the F3-F5 range, which are much deadlier. An F3 tornado includes winds to 165 mph, which is considered a category 5 in the hurricane scale. They don't last nearly as long, but high intensity tornadoes can cause catastrophic damage in seconds where they hit directly, unless the shelter is literally underground.
> Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and some wind/debris damage exactly like the blown over trees you mention.
The insurance companies have done research on the topic (including building giant 'labs' with a large number of fans)
* https://fortifiedhome.org/research/
and have developed standards/techniques that home builders/owners can do to fix a bunch of problems, starting with roofing:
* https://fortifiedhome.org/wp-content/uploads/2020-FORTIFIED-...
Tornados might be more intense but only for a short period of time and in a small area. I don't see any of those where the tornado is lasting days, causing sustained damage. There are some where there are multiple tornadoes in a span, but each individual tornado is itself quick and violent but localized within a mile or so at most.
Compare some incidents with, Hurricane Sandy, for example, where it traveled across the span of a thousand miles and lasted a week of damages.
Yes.
Tornadoes seem like a phenomenon for which insurance is actually a pretty good part of the solution. I mean, it is very unlikely for anything in particular to get hit by a tornado, but it is really devastating. It might take an unreasonable amount of work to build everything to the level where it can sustain a direct hit by a tornado. The expected value of tornado damage is quite low overall, we just need to deal with the individual catastrophes that occur.
Hurricanes… I mean, there are different sized hurricanes in different areas. For the ones that hit Florida, part of the solution is probably legitimately that we should have fewer people living there, because there’s going to be a widespread devastation there occasionally. And if you live in a hurricane-prone area, you are going to get hit by one eventually. (So like what’s the bet here? The insurance company knows they’ll probably have to pay out eventually).
Just to put a number to it, 2024 was apparently an unusually busy year for tornadoes, around $6B. That isn’t nothing! But one single hurricane cost $7B in 2024… and there was a $34B one… and a $79B one… who’s insuring the southern coast of the US? Seems rough.
tornadoes and hail are actually a big driver of property insurance rates. they typically aren’t catastrophic but the frequency is increasing quickly and they do cause an aggregation of claims.
If you have to be inside one, pick a hurricane. But tornadoes are so much smaller. This list is like... 10-20 per year with an average of less than 1 casualty and a dozen houses damaged? That's basically zero as far as insurance and habitability go. I found a study titled "Tornadoes in Europe An Underestimated Threat" and it has an estimate of 10-50 million euros per year in total damage. That's not even 1 euro per house in Europe.
Let's not be silly here. European tornadoes are not taking apart houses to the foundations. Ripping off roofs or flipping over cars or even when trees are falling on a tourist tent and killing them in process has nothing to do with how houses are built in USA and nowadays even in UK and elsewhere.
I think the implication is that this is due to differing building codes. Europe builds houses with brick and concrete, that aren't so easily torn apart. That the difference is in housing quality, not in the weather.
Frankly, I think it's about half to both factors.
The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it: Wealthy coastal landowners believe that the cost of home insurance should be about $2000/year. If their properties actually cost $200,000 per year to insure, then that's what they should have to pay! If they don't like it, they should either build something cheaper (that's the other half of the product) or move to somewhere with less risk.
Tornados are almost the perfect example of an insurable hazard: Very low probability, very high damage, very widely distributed across the affected areas:
https://mrcc.purdue.edu/gismaps/cntytorn#
Click around that neat interactive map, you'll see that the tornado is typically a few miles long and a few hundred yards wide, there are a few thousand severe tornadoes scattered all over the Midwest and somewhat fewer on the east coast in the past 70 years. It's not feasible to build houses everywhere that will stand up to an F5 tornado throwing cars. But they only cause a total loss of a tiny fraction of all houses in the country, and there are relatively few choices anyone east of Texas can make that would meaningfully impact their risk.
You could price insurance premiums at the risk of a tornado times the cost of the insured assets, plus a 10% administrative fee/profit margin, and those rates would be affordable. Maybe a handful of people would choose to live in Colorado instead of a few hundred miles east in Kansas because the cost of this 'tornado insurance' was higher in Kansas, but even in Tornado Alley it wouldn't be unaffordable.
Conversely, if you look at the hurricane incidence and storm surge risk map:
https://coast.noaa.gov/hurricanes/#map=4/32/-80
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/203f772571cb48b1b8b...
and population density along the gulf coast:
https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#7/28.541/-88.011
It's clear that people are choosing to build houses in the narrow strip of low-lying land that's right along the coast and vulnerable to high-probability storm surges! If insurance was priced at cost of assets + administration times risk of loss, it would be really, really expensive.
> If their properties actually cost $200,000 per year to insure, then that's what they should have to pay! If they don't like it, they should either build something cheaper (that's the other half of the product) or move to somewhere with less risk.
Or build something adapted to the risk it faces. In my home town there are houses that were built on flood plains that have recently been flooding every 5 years or so. Luckily they are brick and in order to get these covered you now need to install flood barriers over the doors, and your ground floor has to be adapted to flood without sustaining damage (tile floors, special plaster etc.)
Now when we have a severe flood warning people will move their valuables upstairs if they're house floods they just have to clean out the mud. There are also a couple new houses right next to the river that float and rise and fall on stilts when the banks burst.
> we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it
This is important. Insurance was invented 2000+ years ago but aggressively deploying technology that worsens floods, weather, and fires is only around ~100.
The real issue is global warming causing an exponential rise in tail risk events. It's exponential because even a linear shift in temperature causes an exponential rise at the tails (look at how a normal distribution works).
Insurance is based on statistics. The math they use assumes stationary distributions. Insurance companies can't deal with shifting distributions well so they take the losses and then exit markets.
Global warming is going to mess up insurance as we know it for that reason. Not sure property insurance, but all kinds of insurance.
> The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it
A lot of the responsibility falls upon governments who are lobbied by developers to zone areas for development that should never have been zoned for development in the first place.
I talked to somebody who owned a beach house in South Carolina about 5 years ago and if he wanted flood insurance it would cost $5,000 / month.
The 2024 hurricane season damage totaled $128.072 billion.
I couldn't find data for tornadoes in aggregate, only individual storms.
> Economically, tornadoes cause about a tenth as much damage per year, on average, as hurricanes. Hurricanes tend to cause much more overall destruction than tornadoes because of their much larger size, longer duration and their greater variety of ways to damage property. The destructive core in hurricanes can be tens of miles across, last many hours and damage structures through storm surge and rainfall-caused flooding, as well as from wind. Tornadoes, in contrast, tend to be a few hundred yards in diameter, last for minutes and primarily cause damage from their extreme winds
https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/how-...
Tornados are indeed scary. I have seen a house cut in half like a knife by one. You could see the doors ripped off the medicine cabinet on the second floor and meds still on the shelf.
But tornados are also significantly smaller. A hurricane will damage a thousand square miles while a hurricane will mess up 50. It’s not quite right but the proportions are in that ballpark.
the US would avoid flood damage if they just built apartment buildings. Asian apartments towers are immune to flooding because they allocate the ground floor to parking. Can't blow the roof off a square concrete building either.
Ofc, a sufficiently strong Tornado is destroying everything in its wake. But, they're rare in comparison.
As the governments in the US get increasingly incompetent, insurance prices are going to have to rise. Government services are largely there to protect you during black swan events, so if those services get less and less effective, you're going to need more insurance for those events.
This was the whole issue. California made it illegal for insurance companies to raise rates, so the insurance companies stop renewals. Leaving everybody uninsured. Homeowners couldn't buy insurance at any price.
Public insurance. For housing, healthcare, maybe even cars (since the coprorate political complex insists that we HAVE to drive everywhere). At some point, we have to accept that the middlemen are siphoning value, not providing any. Vanguard it and let elected admins set the codes.
It’s regulated, not illegal.
“Experts say the insurance landscape in California is particularly tricky because, in addition to the wildfire risk, the state has a law that adds extra approval measures, including board approval and review by the insurance commissioner, if an insurance company wants to raise the rate of insurance by more than 7%. That’s been in effect since the 1980s.” https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/05/what-homeowners-need-to-know...
These aren’t black swan events. These are swan events, if anything.
Wildfires are not the problem. They happen all the time without causing billion-dollar insurance claims. Insurance is always assets x risk. The issue is expensive flamable housing (assets) in a wildfire area (risk). We ask for trouble when we create million-dollar wooden houses surrounded by manicured gardens in desert enviroments. And build on a slope facing pervailing winds. The answer is concrete/brick houses with metal/ceramic rooves surrounded by sand/stone/concrete. Want a big green lawn? Move to the pacific northwest. Want to live near the beating heart of the movie industry, a town where it never rains? Get used to cactuses instead of rose gardens.
That doesn't align with the reality of these areas. To get insurance in these areas you have to demonstrate that you have created a defensible space around your house. This is enforced by local fire department inspections. I know this because I live near a fire prone area. Despite these things the area still burned. The problem isn't "lawns" or "wooden houses". In the case of the LA fires you would have had the burned out husks of concrete houses that would need to be demolished if everything was made of concrete. This was a black swan event that will require a thoughtful response.
From the recent events in California I have seen many photos of burnt houses with unburnt trees around. I think those houses were especially flammable more than some vegetation around it seems. After the fire nothing remained but the chimneys. I have never seen any house burn like that in Europe.
I live along the Mediterranean sea in France, many wood fires every summer, with wind above 100km/h; never seen so many houses burn like in California even when most of our houses are concrete but with wooden framework.
I'm pretty sure that if houses were built like here (concrete / concrete blocks with terracota tiles on wooden framwork) at lot less would have burnt. Maybe those near the wooded slopes but not in the middle of a neighborhood block.
Those protections are all about keeping a structure from catching fire. That is different than designing a structure not to burn. A wooden house surrounded by fire protection is OK under current rules. But it is still wood and will, eventually, burn when faced by a wild fire on all sides. A house built out of rock/brick/concrete/sand will not. We need to go beyond flamability and start reducing the actual number of calories availible to be burned.
> Despite these things the area still burned.
I suspect the rules for making a defensible house were wrong. For example, I read an article recently that posited that most of the fire was spread by burning embers on the wind, and not by intense heat from nearby flames.
The idea is to look at where embers accumulate and eliminate or fireproof those areas. For example, a low masonry wall a few feet from the house can stop a lot of heavier burning embers from piling up against the house. If you've got a swimming pool, add a pump to it that feeds sprinklers in the yard and on the rooftop.
There are a lot of homes that did not burn - look at them and figure out why they didn't burn.
For a related example, every airplane crash is looked at, and we always discover overlooked vulnerabilities. The tsunami that devastated Japan a few years ago also provided a lot of information about what worked and didn't work.
We're a long way from needing to give up. There's a lot of low hanging fruit.
Sure, but that's how it already works. The airplane example is how building codes generally work. London didn't rebuild in wood after the Great Fire, to give an ancient, and large-scale, example.
From what I've read, the houses in LA that did survive were modern or heavily remodeled houses incorporating recent code changes to prevent embers from entering the eaves and suchlike.
It really doesn't help that most of LA was built up in the early to mid 20th century; requiring code updates during remodels can only help so much, because if the cost/change is too much/invasive the homeowners either don't remodel at all or do it without permits, bypassing the more costly safety improvements.
A forward looking (part of a) solution for Malibu would be the county acquiring and maintaining beach paths every few houses. Prescribed 10' wide fire breaks.
This solves the fire problem AND the limited access to a public resource that is common in Malibu.
Ideally a permeable surface without any growth, cleared at least 2x a year.
Legal Eagle claims that embers can travel up to 2 miles:
https://youtu.be/5h1H36rdprs?t=1m51s
That would easily jump a 10' fire break.
houses however, survived with much smaller fire breaks.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yZe-TlYxm9g&pp=ygUkaG91c2VzIHR...
especially for this fire, jumping doesnt mean that everything 2 miles down wind also burned down. buildings that far had the opportunity to burn, and if they dud, had the opportunity to burn their neighbors, and another 2 miles down.
i imagine ember density is more interesting than distance?
> the county acquiring and maintaining beach paths every few houses. Prescribed 10' wide fire breaks
Ooh, and make a bailout conditional on homeowners (or counties) agreeing to eminent domain.
I would prefer no bailouts.
If insurance wants firebreaks for insurance, that is their choice.
If the city wants buy RE for access, that is between tax payers and the land owners. Cash talks
That would not have solved the problem in this fire since wind speed was so high. The videos showed embers traveling far and fast. Having a 10 foot fire break would not have prevented the spread. One thing to look into is how the fire started and if the electrical equipment can be made safer, like being underground in some places.
The break would need a low masonry wall to stop embers from being pushed along the ground.
Why is the answer not Japan's approach. My understanding is that because of high incidents of natural disaster they see/build homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as long-lasting investments.
Partially because that story about Japan is incorrect.
In reality, it is Japanese condos that get gutted periodically or when sold, and it's driven by their real estate tax code.
Japan takes enormous effort to prevent and mitigate natural disasters.
There may have been some truth to it 200 years ago, with the idea that wood was the only economical way to build a house that could last.
I recall reading somewhere that the Indians had done controlled burns before Europeans settled in the parts of the U.S. where fires are now a problem. European settlers who displaced them did not continue the controlled burns and then fires became a problem. Apparently, if you do regular controlled burns, the severity of fires is reduced and healthy trees survive it. When you do not, when fires do occur, all trees die and the fires spread out of control.
I recall reading the same thing, however I do recall that they were East coast native Indians, that cleared oak tree forests as a hunting grounds, so completelly unrelated to the problem in California. The story was about native land rights and if such looking after their hunting grounds can be seen as claims on property rights, which Indians did not knew as a concept, so it is a moot point anyway. The issues that plague CA seems to be chaos in organization level - from what I have read these wildfires are happening in the year, that did had moderate drought(compared to others), so I would look suspiciously in this with the mind, that if politicians are blaming climate, then it is a sign that they are absolutelly responsible for what they have not done and promised to people. But I do not own a house there and I have not voted for these people and I absolutelly would not hang them in the chimney of my house.
PS Also, there are many opportunists, that were burning their houses to receive insurance or compensations, so not all of those houses were burned by wildfires. It all looks ugly, regadless from what angle you look, because if there is no responsibility - even from the ones that have taken upon resposibility, then catastrophe is expected - sooner than later.
Yosemite NP, especially the iconic valley, looked vastly different when the Europeans first arrived in the nineteenth century. It was sparsely forested and had lots of meadows. After a 150 years of no controlled burns, it's a dense forest down there. It turns out the native peoples were managing the forest, after all.
I thought that the idea that they did not understand property rights was a misconception. The different tribes had their own territories, and they clearly had an idea of the territory belonging to one or another. This is also why people negotiating with them for land would use underhanded negotiating tactics such as getting their leaders drunk for the negotiations so that they would agree to absurd deals. If they did not understand property rights, there would have been no point to doing that.
We had a lot of rain the last couple of years (before 2024), which got us out of severe drought for several years back into "moderate". 2024 has been QUITE dry, relatively speaking, but because of the previous years of a LOT of rain, it's only back to moderate drought status, AFAICT.
The years with lots of rain caused MUCH extra plant growth, and anyone who's been here a while expected several bad fires during our fire season in 2024 as the first "dry" year after a "wet" year. The fact that it's only been 1 major one and a few minor ones has actually been a bit of a surprise.
> East coast native Indians
This is false. Fire was unambiguously part of the practice of native Californians.
> opportunists
What is this slander.
I recall seeing a documentary on TV about this. Indigenous Americans were behind the effort to resurrect the practice.
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/fire/indigenous-fire-practices-...
> The truth is that the rich diversity and stunning landscapes of places like Yosemite and other natural environments in the United States were intentionally cultivated by Native Americans for thousands of years. And their greatest tool was fire.
Theory: Damages in the USA have gone up because mold mitigation was incorporated as a serious consideration only fairly recently. If you increase your definition of what damage is and the work required to fix it then 'damage occurring' will appear to suddenly go up.
Where is “here”? Are you sure you aren’t confusing hurricanes and tornados? Hurricanes rarely destroy houses in the US, either.
How are you making this claim? Every time a hurricane hits Florida, there are photos of entire neighborhoods devastated by wind and storm surge. How many people were permanently displaced by Katrine? Etc. Maybe many of the homes weren't technically "destroyed", but each storm brings millions or billions in damage.
Hurricanes are common. The general case is they hit hundreds or thousands of square miles and destroy none or at worst a tiny fraction of the homes they hit.
Take Katrina from my friends and family living in New Orleans, you’ll find city streets where none of the houses go significantly damaged. They lost power long enough you don’t want to open the fridge, but most of the city was fine in the hardest hit city from one of the most expensive storms on record.
A lot has to do with infrastructure.
In most of South Florida basically anything left standing is pretty well built to withstand hurricanes.
A category 1 storm hitting NYC or North Carolina is an unbelievable disaster. A category 1 storm hitting Broward County is usually disruptive to everyday life but that’s it.
Hurricanes usually don't affect the structure of a house. They might damage the roof, parts of exterior cladding, perhaps windows, and the flooding which accompanies hurricanes destroys personal possessions, interior furnishing, electrical wiring, and appliances.
In the US, manual labor is very expensive, home construction or repair is highly regulated and requires permits and multiple inspections from the local government, and the amount of flood-destroyable stuff - material possessions, furnishings, appliances - in a typical home is massive. As a result, a cyclone which a poorer country would survive with a shrug in the US becomes an extremely expensive disaster.
It's so interesting to see the people in awe of that "fire hurricane" video in L.A....
We had a way more intense drought than they in my city last year (theirs are not that intense). We also had 50 km/h winds. We also had higher temperatures... And all of those to levels that we never saw before. Also, we have more trees in our cities. We had new "fire hurricane" videos every week (normally, every other year somebody films one).
And we had to evacuate dozens of homes, luckily no one was destroyed and people could return 2 months later.
You’re comparing apples to oranges.
A Santa Ana wind is extremely dry and this one hit 100kmh (not 50). And it hasn’t really rained for 8 months (since May 2024). And we had a very wet winter last year, so there’s extra growth to fuel any fire. And finally, there’s 10 million people live in LA County, it’s a target rich space.
Please let me know where else is having the same sort of fire without destroying homes.
The 50 km/h was sustained, not peak, but ok, I don't think we reached 100.
We have 7 million people living around, and yeah, only 6 months without a single drop of rain (19X days, where I don't remember what X was). Fire often destroys some homes, we got luck last year.
Look, the annual fire disasters in California are not a normal thing.
If people just point out it's not normal, people complain that nowhere else has fire so nobody else understands the problem. If people point out similar places, looks like it's "Four Yorkshiremen-ing" (whatever that is). So, yeah, let it keep burning, whatever.
To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.
Perhaps what should be more commonly accepted is that the US is a land of great natural beauty! And large tracts of it should be left to nature.
What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400?
Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case.
New Orleans is a future Atlantis.
San Francisco is a city built by Monty Python. Don't build it there it'll fall down, but I built it anyway, and it fell down, so I built it again...
> What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400?
The average high temperature in Phoenix in July is 106.5F (41.4C). If you are cooling to 70.0F (21.1C), that's a difference of 36.5F (20.3C).
The average January low in Berlin is 28.0F (-2.2C). If you are heating to 65.0F (18.3C), that's a difference of 37.0F (20.5C).
I feel like many people living in climates that don't require air conditioning have this view that it's fantastically inefficient and wasteful. Depending on how you are heating (e.g. if you are using a gas boiler), cooling can be significantly more efficient per degree of difference. Especially if you don't have to dehumidify the air, as in Phoenix.
You’re ignoring one critical difference between these two scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities, produce heat as a waste product. It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.
So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat the space. But in a hot space, it’s an extra 80W that needs to be removed.
Add to that all of the appliances in a home. It’s not unusual for a home to be drawing 100W of electricity just keep stuff powered on in standby, and that’s another 100W of “free” heating. All of this is before we get to big ticket items, like hobs, ovens, water heaters etc.
So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.
All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper). But practically impossible to create a cool individual environment around a person. So in cold spaces you don’t have to heat everything up to same temperature for the space to be perfectly liveable, but when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.
This simply is not true for a furnace or electric resistive heat.
My furnace produces 0.9W of heat for every 1W of energy input. More efficient ones do 0.98, the best you get with electric resistive heat is 1W.
On the other hand my air conditioner moves 3.5W of heat outside for every 1W of energy input.
"cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space" Man I wish this was true but it definitely isn't in anyplace that gets significantly cold. Heat pumps are super super efficient at cooling but they get less efficient at heating the colder it gets. Humans and appliances create a pretty negligible amount of heat.
I also point out that Phoenix's "summer" last longer than Berlin's winter:
https://weatherspark.com/y/75981/Average-Weather-in-Berlin-G...
https://weatherspark.com/y/2460/Average-Weather-in-Phoenix-A...
The figure you are looking for is heating/cooling degree-days.
For each day, use the average high and the average low. Subtract the desired maximum dwelling temperature from the average high: if the result is positive, add it to the cooling degree-days total. Subtract the average low from the from the minimum dwelling temperature: if the result is positive, add it to the heating degree-days total.
Over a year, that gives you comparable figures on how much you will need to cool or heat the space. Many agencies calculate this for specific areas.
Here, for example, are the current season numbers for Boston: https://www.massenergymarketers.org/resources/degree-days/bo...
Generic regional numbers for the US: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/units-and-calculators/de...
It is true that heat is easier to generate. Berlin is considered mild while Phoenix is considered very hot. They just happen to have the same temperature deltas. On the whole, the world spends many, many times more energy heating living spaces than cooling them. The coldest cities people live in just have much larger room temperature deltas than the hottest.
A lot of what you said is intuitively/directionally correct, but misses a lot of important physics related to heat transfer in buildings and operational questions of space heating equipment.
This is your most accurate/relevant point:
> All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper).
Whereas this is plainly wrong:
> It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it.
And then the following is correct but the marginal reduction in load is minimal except in relatively crowded spaces (or spaces with very high equipment power densities):
> Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.
The truth is it is generally easier to cool not heat when you take into account the necessary energy input to achieve the desired action on the psychrometric chart, assuming by “ease” you mean energy (or emissions) used, given that you are operating over a large volume of air - which does align with your point about the jumper to be fair!
Generally speaking, an A/C uses approx. 1 unit of electricity for every 3 units of cooling that it produces since it uses heat transfer rather than heat generation (simplified ELI5). It is only spending energy to move heat, not make it. On the other hand, a boiler or furnace or resistance heat system generally uses around 1 unit of input energy for every 0.8-0.9 units of heating energy produced. Heat pumps achieve similar to coefficients of performance as A/Cs, because they are effectively just A/Cs operating in reverse.
Your point about a jumper is great, but there are local cooling strategies as well (tho not as effective), eg using a fan or an adiabatic cooling device (eg a mister in a hot dry climate).
> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space.
Once you move to cost, it now also depends on your fuel prices, not just your demand and system type. For instance, in America, nat gas is so cheap, that even with its inefficiencies relative to a heat pump, if electricity is expensive heating might still be cheaper than cooling per unit of thermal demand (this is true for instance in MA, since electricity is often 3x the price of NG). On the other hand, if elec is less than 3x the cost of nat gas, then cooling is probably cheaper than heating per unit of demand, assuming you use natural gas for your heating system.
Everyone seems to be making the same mistake here. As you say:
> Generally speaking, an A/C uses approx. 1 unit of electricity for every 3 units of cooling that it produces since it uses heat transfer rather than heat generation
You know you can use a heatpump to heat a space as well right? Then you get to move 3 units of heat into the space, plus you also get to use that extra unit energy used to power the heatpump, because the heatpump turns the unit of energy into waste heat! (After all energy can’t be destroyed, so it has to go somewhere).
Cooling takes less energy per BTU moved vs heating. In AC/heat pumps that's represented by SEER rating for cooling and HSPF rating for heating (heat pumps). Modern ACs have SEER ratings for 20+ and HSPF ratings for 8+. What it means is that on average, spending 1 BTU equivalent of electrical energy cools down the house by 20 BTU. Similarly for heat pump it means spending 1 BTU of electricity heats up the house by 8 BTU. Electric resistive heating is equivalent of HSPF 1.
Also in sunny climates it's easy to use solar energy for cooling making it carbon net-zero. Cold places typically burn natural gas for heating, it's much harder to make heating carbon net-zero.
You can use a heatpump for heating as well. Then not only do you get all the energy moved by the heat pump to warm a space. But you can also use the waste heat created by the heatpump for heating as well.
In a cooling scenario, all waste heat is just that, waste. But in a heating scenario, waste heat isn’t waste, it’s additional heat you can use, and reduces the total amount of energy you need to inject into the system.
This is a good point that I had not considered, and I will add a few additional thoughts:
* In cold weather, solar heat gain can work in your favor as well. Much of the effect will depend on the orientation, shading, and properties of your windows, though. On the other hand, as another commenter pointed out, more sun in southern, cooling-dominated climate can also mean more, cheaper electricity.
* If you have a heat pump water heater, it will actually _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred from your home to your water and mostly goes down the drain with it.
* At 65F (18.3C), most people I know would already be wearing a jumper/sweater. That's why I chose a lower target temperature for Berlin. The best source I could find[1] indicates that in November-December of 2022 (in the context of rising energy prices due to Russia's war with Ukraine), Germans actually kept their houses at 19.4C, on average.
* Maybe I'm moving the goalposts a bit, but I chose Berlin mostly because the numbers worked out conveniently. As someone who grew up in the American upper midwest, I wouldn't consider Berlin to be particularly cold. Phoenix, on the other hand, is the hottest city in the country and its summers are some of the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature than the coldest are.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/80-percent-german-house... (original report is on German)
> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space
Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses less efficient technology than cooling and has to work across a higher temperature difference.
In Alberta or Minnesota, where the delta in the winter can be as high as 60 degrees centigrade (-40 outside, +20 inside) but only 20 degrees centigrade at most in the summer (+45 outside, +25 inside), heating is far more costly. Even accounting for waste heat from appliances. Most heating is done with furnaces, not heat pumps. Air conditioners are heat pumps and are 3x as efficient as a furnace. There are also less energy intensive cooling methods - shading, fans, swamp coolers - commonly used in the developing world and continental Europe.
On the other hand in a place with warm winters and hot summers, such as south east Asia, obviously cooling is more expensive because heating is unnecessary.
The highest temperature ever recorded is around 60 degrees centrigrade, a mere 23 degrees above the human body. The low temperature record is like -90, 127 degrees below body temperature. Needing to heat large deltas is way more common than needing to cool high deltas. And cooling is done with heat pumps, which are more efficient than the technologies used most commonly for heating (resistive or combustion).
> when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
Keep the house at 25 degrees centigrade and run a ceiling fan. 23 if you're a multi-millionaire. You'll be far more comfortable outdoors if your house is closer to the outside temperature. The North American need to have sub-arctic temperatures in every air conditioned space in the summertime is bizarre (don't even get me started on ice water).
100%. And can be wonderfully done by efficient heatpumps that cover the warmer months too. Also nice correlation between hot and sunny areas which means solar can get you to net zero pretty quick. (Says man looking at his solar panels right now covered with snow.)
you cannot win this argument with the average person who lives in a chilly European country. it just does not compute.
there are whole important cultural lifeways related to opening and closing windows at proper times for efficient cooling and ventilation. these work really well — in Europe — and are treasured traditions.
getting people to accept AC is sort of like trying to convince the average American to go grocery shopping on a bicycle. some may accept the idea but only the most European influenced already.
There's a big gap between "accept AC" and "build a megapolis in a city named after a bird that bursts into flames."
Phoenix is a slow-rolling disaster regardless of whether it's easier to heat or cool a room to comfort.
This is such an interesting perspective that I've never thought about. Thanks!
Yes, insulation works both ways. My garage is unheated and insulated. If I go out there to work on something in the winter I always compare the temperature outside. On a sunny day it might be pleasant outside and freezing in my garage - so I'll open the door and let it warm up.
Insulation makes the house more resistance to temperature change (relative to the inside and outside).
One thing people forget is the delta is very different in the summer and winter. Lets say your thermostat is on 70 year round. If it is 100 degrees out you only have to cool 30 degrees. When it is 0 F out you have a delta of 70 degrees. So for this scenario, expect to use more energy in the winter.
> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.
Japan comes to mind as a country that's solved this.
> Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case.
Relevant: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flame...
Sure Japan did it, so did Mexico. The latter is probably much more important as an example for the US.
https://www.preventionweb.net/news/not-drill-how-1985-disast...
Many of the gouses burning weren't built to current codes, but the cost to retrofit houses to code was insurmountable by any of the owners and apparently by the state or even the nation. So they will just wait for them all to burn and then rebuild them I guess?
I would be interested to know how Japan combats wildfires. Historically at least it was quite a big problem, if I recall correctly.
There's plenty of water for Californians in California + The Colorado River.
The problem is that our government has spent ~100 years ensuring that corporations have easier and cheaper access to it so that they can grow feed for farm animals to sell overseas, largely to places like UAE that have sufficiently depleted their own water table as to make it impossible to grow alfalfa, thus worsening the risk of droughts for the sole benefit of the shareholders of these corporations.
Every gov't agency in the US needs to start treating our natural resources as if they belong to all the citizens of the country and not a select few shareholders of whichever corporation can earn the most money by exploiting them.
I won't disagree with you, but it's a big change.
When European descendants started colonizing that part of the world they treated all the resources as free for the taking. You went into nature, developed some land for agriculture, and it became yours by right. The same with the water. It was essentially homesteading.
So water was treated as property the same way the land was. Whoever used it first, owned it. Leaving out the natives because apparently nobody cared about them, it made sense.
How we fix it now within that legal framework is the question.
Hey I'm trying to alleviate this issue from a technical standpoint and am trying to find others to join me. It's no cure-all, but the other paths would upend a century of legal precedence. Shoot me a PM if you're looking for work.
> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.
Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo in 1755 that killed tens of thousands.
When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and masonry walls for fire resistance.
Nowadays, most new buildings seem to use reinforced concrete.
I wonder if American children are taught the story of the three little pigs.
Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn that wood is the only appropriate building material and the Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest of trees to construct.
The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology was created in California. It's either naive or willfully ignorant to think we can't solve this problem.
The issue with those materials is cost. Spread out, suburban design without density is expensive and wood frame construction is a great way to affordably build housing. Wood frame single family houses are not the problem - it's how we design our cities that's the problem.
Hy from Brazil... You know, a poor country.
We make single-level houses with a reinforced concrete structure, because it's cheap.
You know what isn't cheap? Wood. Wood is incredibly expensive to put into a shape, even if you are willing to cut forests down to get it.
What's the alternative? It's not particularly viable to just relocate an entire city.
Then there's the question of where to move them to. Between wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes you've eliminated most of the coasts. Much of the rest of the country defines its identity to a significant degree as being opposed to cosmopolitan cities. That doesn't leave a lot of places to move to even if we could just move the cities.
Japan has seismic activity, tsunamis, typhoons, landslides and flooding. Instead of building bunker houses they see homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as long-lasting investments. Perhaps homes in these high risks areas should be treated similarly.
Honest question. Why when people describe wood framed homes do they always phrase it like houses made from "firewood", "sticks", "twigs" etc? It at least for me always detracts from the argument at hand. You could just as easily build a wood framed home with an exterior shell that is fire resistant using modern materials or brick.
Well, we are commenting on an article specifically about the spread of fire in urban areas, as we've seen in LA this week.
Here in the seismically stable UK, we had problems with fire spreading in urban areas [1] in 1666. So we banned wood exteriors on buildings. It works pretty well if you don't need to worry about earthquakes or hurricanes; brick doesn't burn.
This lesson is taught in history classes to 10 year olds, and they don't tend to go into other countries' construction traditions, or reasons not to use bricks.
“Stick-built” is the name for it.
There are two main ways to build a house out of wood. You can go for stick-built construction or timber framing. Homes in the US were mostly timber framed until the early 1900s. Advancements in tools and manufacturing techniques has resulted in stick-built homes becoming dominant in the US since then.
If you search for “stick-built” you’ll see pictures and encyclopedia articles describing it. The basic idea is that you take standard dimensional lumber (like 2x4s), bring it onto the site, and assemble it into the frame for the house. Timber construction uses larger pieces of timber to make the house.
I’m not an expert but it seems to me that stick-built construction took over the country because of advancements in fasteners. If you tried to make a stick-built house in the 1800s it would fall apart, but this is the 2000s, and they make a million of them every year.
It draws a compelling portrait in people's minds. Everybody knows how easily sticks burn.
> Here in the seismically stable UK
I don't think the US has enough seismic activity to be much different. Chile and Japan do fine with solid construction and periodic 6-8 Richter earthquakes. California is allegedly a seismic state within the USA and it rarely sees a 4 degree one, and when it happens it makes it to the US national news (and sometimes even to the news back home, but as a comedy break because people don't even think about getting out of bed if it's not a 6).
I'm not sure about hurricanes, but maintenance can't be much different as rotten wood and moldy bricks are both a problem. Maybe insulating bricks is more expensive?
> This lesson is taught in history classes to 10 year olds, and they don't tend to go into other countries' construction traditions, or reasons not to use bricks.
Cultural differences don't help here, in the US people think about rebuilding homes way more often than people in Europe, so there's this mindset that the home doesn't need to last that long because it will be rebuilt anyways. This shorter life span, "freedom" and profits thanks to lower costs also call for little regulation that forces the building code to aim to survive the regional disasters from the past 60+ years. California's fire code is probably an outlier, but SF had to burn down for the regulation to come out.
I think you underestimate the frequency, strength, and geographic distribution of strong earthquakes in the US. There is nothing comparable in Europe. You have to engineer for the strongest earthquake, not the average one, and on the US west coast that is M8-9+ depending on the specific location. The construction techniques in Japan and US are very similar because both have similarly extreme earthquakes.
The entire western third of the US is has several M7+ earthquakes per century, with a M6 every couple years, and the occasional M8-9+. The 1964 Anchorage earthquake was stronger (M9.2) than the 2011 Japanese earthquake that caused the great tsunami.
In the eastern US, there is a giant seismic zone that had multiple M8+ earthquakes in the 19th century. These were so powerful they changed the path of the mighty Mississippi River. People forget about it because it hasn’t had a large earthquake in over a century.
A lot of R&D is done on new construction techniques for extreme earthquake risks. The challenge with reinforced concrete is the absurd amount of reinforcement and steel you need to make it survive an earthquake that strong, which makes construction slow and expensive. The state-of-the-art doesn’t use reinforced concrete at all, even in skyscrapers; they use specially designed welded steel plates and fill the empty spaces with poured concrete.
The US has an anomalously high exposure to natural disasters as an accident of geography. For example, people often forget just how many active volcanoes there are in the US, including multiple super-volcanoes. While I live in an area well-known for its M9+ earthquake and tsunami risk, I can see three active volcanoes from my kitchen window.
> There is nothing comparable in Europe.
Right, Europe has little seismic activity, so the rare 4M_W earthquake takes down random 400yo buildings easily. My point was that building with bricks was not a problem, Japan and Chile build houses and skyscrapers just fine.
> I think you underestimate the frequency, strength, and geographic distribution of strong earthquakes in the US
Sir, I'm from Chile. Beyond earthquakes in Alaska the US is no match, and that land it's not even close to the US. I promise you the Danish construction code has not been heavily influenced by Greenland.
One huge problem with respect to fire resistance, in American home's, are the use of truss connector plates. While they have many advantages in cost and allow impressive cheap big houses, they fundamentally weaken the wood when it burns. Often houses just collapse on that joints, not because the overall beam failed, but this interface. In the end the use of "wood" is blamed, but that failed to address the rootcause.
For me it's the result of pent-up anger from the popularity of drywall and particle board here in the US.
It's not a big leap to go from complaining about the furniture and the walls being made from what seems like highly compressed dust to also complaining that underneath it all is a bunch of sticks.
It so often feels like a house of cards.
I don’t understand the sense of entitlement towards every nuclear family owning a building constructed with stone, steel, and concrete. None of these things are available in a level of abundance to grant them to every person alive. While concrete only construction is more common in developing countries I certainly question the quality. I lived in an apartment like this in South Asia and it had no weather insulating ability whatsoever, the plaster was constantly crumbling, and the doors would jam up. Not to mention the recurring nearby stories of an apartments roof collapsing on its occupant.
I am thankful to live in a county where land and building ownership are more available to the common man than most and many people can escape being perpetual renters. Wood construction enables that. Plus North Americans love to adjust and remodel their homes and have unique shapes with high ceilings etc etc etc which is really helped with our construction techniques. The only thing I hate is termite risk and that could probably be resolved by allowing framing with pressure treated wood
It helps with availability of materials if people don't expect to have like 500sqft per person. But that's not how modern houses are built in US, at least not in my neck of the woods (Seattle suburbs). As for the quality of housing, I'm from ex-Soviet satellite state and lived in a prefab apartment block - yeah, it was a bit dated but no major problems with quality that I could tell. The main nuisance was lack of acoustic insulation.
Termites are only a problem if you enable them with a source of moisture. If you have termites eating your house something else has gone very wrong.
Southern California would like to chat. They’re so pervasive here that the fumigation chemicals used are one of the states largest greenhouse gas emissions.
> You could just as easily build a wood framed home with an exterior shell that is fire resistant using modern materials or brick.
That is actually how pretty much all new houses in the UK are constructed. They are pre-fabbed timber frames with a brick facade. It's quite common for British people to be snobby about building materials. I wonder how many don't realise their house is timber framed.
> That is actually how pretty much all new houses in the UK are constructed
This claim struck me as unlikely, so I did a quick fact check.
Accroding to the most recent report I could find[1]: "Figures from the National House Building (NHBC) suggest that timber frame market share has developed from 19% in 2015 to 22% in 2021 and that market conditions, as described above, present the opportunity for this to develop to circa 27% by the end of the forecast period (2025)"
This appears to be driven by Scotland where 92% of new builds were timber framed in 2019, while in England (where the majority of new houses are built) it was just 9%.
[1] https://members.structuraltimber.co.uk/assets/library/stamar...
Dimensional lumber is often called sticks, in the building industry, probably because it's quicker. For example, if a roof is built from individual pieces of dimensional lumber, instead of pre-built trusses, the building method isn't called dimensional-lumber-built but stick-built.
Brick, stucco, concrete siding are all fire resistant and commonly used in construction in the last 25 years.
Insulation plays into combustability as well, where mineral / rock wool has thermal mass, does not ignite, but us construction has recently favored fiberglass and cellulose for the the costs.
Look at houses in California. Most have fire resistant stucco exteriors. It's the style out here.
A 2x4 is just a big stick. It's smaller in shape than some logs you throw on the fire, and it's nice and dry.
Some of us live in reinforced concrete socialist-built apartment buildings, and our homes don't burn like american houses do. Same for single family houses made from brics and cement (most houses here)
Same for eg. gas explosions, this is one one looks like in us:
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/23081219122...
And this is one over here:
https://www.prlekija-on.net/uploaded/2018_11/eksplozija-plin...
Same for eg floods, pump the basements and ground levels, repaint, move stuff back in. Someone from US I work with on a project had a pipe burst while on vacation, and insurance wrote off their whole house, because of a few days of water.
I mean, sure, you could that, but looking at the photos from fire-affected areas, nobody did that, it's all burnt to the ground.
I think you missed the point. Its the same as me asking about the drab prisons you live in. Not to mention your cherry picked examples don't really hold up. A 2500sqft home filled with natural gas has a different explosive potential than a small apartment. I am also not sure it makes sense to build homes expecting for a natural gas explosion, not even a measurable risk. You can absolutely build a home that is fire resistant which most modern homes in fire risk areas are.
A lot of people do, in fact, talk like that about eastern european homes (them selves included).
Even single family homes are built from bricks and cement. Even large ones.
It's not just gas explosion, it's 'everything', fire, structural rigidity (only ground floor houses are rare, almost non existant here), and well.. they're built to last.
https://www.metropolitan.si/kronika/tovornjak-trcil-v-hiso-s... <- a truck hit a building, and old one, and you can see the damage... one wall. The girl in the room survived.
I mean... again.. you could build a home that is "fire resistant", and we do, but most americans don't, as we see in LA.
I am not sure what built to last means and not sure if evidence exists that it makes much different over multiple generations. Those SFH built to last as you would say, will still undergo major renovations as technology improves and tastes change. Certainly when in areas that are prone for specific types of disasters, there should be designs to minimize risk but again that happens in the US but often (not always) these major disasters play out in areas of risk but the even is black swan compared to history.
>Honest question. Why when people describe wood framed homes do they always phrase it like houses made from "firewood", "sticks", "twigs" etc?
Europeans are jealous that they clearcut all their forests 1000 years ago and want to brag up their cinderblock homes that no one can actually afford to buy anymore. 40% down on their 50 year mortgages yadda yadda.
I would assume that earthquake insurance in japan is a reasonable model for "world insurance".
It looks like it's a reinsurance program:
https://www.mof.go.jp/english/policy/financial_system/earthq...
So, I think the answer is "no".
Japan is probably not a good comparison for home insurance because houses in Japan typically only have a 20 to 30 year lifespan. After that they are usually torn down and a new house is built.
Its a country built on seismically active volcanoes.
If there's earthquake insurance in japan, it should be do-able.
"In and around Japan, one-tenth of earthquakes in the world occur. " https://geoscienceletters.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/...
Home values in Japan are somewhat anomalous. There are some good policies that contribute to this, but also other factors that make me reluctant to generalize from Japan. It’s a country with declining natural population, where houses are assets that rapidly decline in value to the point where they’re nearly worthless not that long after you buy them.
Average home age in Japan is 30 years. I think, maybe once or twice, I’ve lived in a building less than 30 years old in the US. I’ve spent most of my life in buildings built pre-war. There aren’t so many pre-war buildings in Japan, but the US takes the blame for that one :-(
The topic was "is the world becoming uninsurable?" with some climate-panic being implied, oh gosh.
If a country with 1/10th of the worlds seismic activity can have (earthquake) insurance, then well dammit, I think it can be done.
Insurance, afaict, is just gambling, and well darnit you can gamble on anything.
The odds might be terrible, but there's ways of hedging your bets I've heard.
I am not a gambler.
Why would anyone tear down a 20 year old house? Where I live the houses are 80-100 years old and they’re better built and nicer to live in than most newer homes.
The traditional materials used in Japanese construction of everyday homes aren't really in the "built to last" category: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1DP5xpM3Y8 . In some cases, trying to make a house that was resistant to floods, fires and earthquakes at the same time would have been prohibitively expensive. I'm sure that led to forming habits that have continued into more modern eras of building styles where it's less required.
They're also smaller, which makes construction costs cheaper which means people are more likely to make dramatic changes when fashion changes. And then there's more of a culture of prefab house building rather than extensions etc. Planning is also a lot more liberal which allows the rebuilt house to be more different and also reduces the cost of the process.
I think even in Europe some of the older houses are houses of theseus though. The exterior shell is the same, but there's plenty of buildings in the local city centre that were tenements, then small business offices, then apartments, with significant remodeling that occurred. Or the house I used to live in was built in the 1880s, extended in the 1950s and significantly modernised in the 2000s. Each time there would have involved largely gutting the interior and rebuilding.
Interesting, thanks! The regulatory explanation makes a lot of sense- I once tried to pull a permit to install a ceiling fan in a small USA town, and it was a nightmare.
Basically houses in Japan are treated like cars -- as something that doesn't appreciate in value as in most places but rather depreciate over time. Some of this is maybe cultural from the time when houses in Japan were literally constructed with paper.
Do we know why the insurance companies can't simply raise the insurance price to match the risks in those areas that are prone to natural disasters? I mean in general, not as in California where the government imposes strange policies. Speaking of the policy, why wouldn't California allow the insurance company raise the premium by region? Doesn't such policy benefit the rich at the cost of the poor as the rich love to live by the hills, lakes, or beaches, which is very much against the ideology of California?
California's ideology is to protect at all costs the people who already live among its hills, lakes, and beaches. Insurance and property tax hikes are threats insofar as they could drain your wealth. The (other, new) rich are a threat insofar as they could become your neighbors and ruin the view. The state protects you in both directions.
It's more complicated than that, as always. Here's some (incomplete) background on Florida:
https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/03/how-floridas-home-insuranc...
Re: California, I don't understand the context for your question, or why you would think the California government is more strange than any other US state government. There's no universally-accepted "ideology of California." It's a big state with a huge, diverse population.
tl;dr, though: California does allow insurers to do that, but is using currently an antiquated set of rules that don't allow for modern risk management approaches. It's been rewriting those rules recently to fix this; I think the new rules are supposed to be in effect starting this year.
It was based on some reports (or podcast? I can't remember) that the California government didn't allow the insurers to sufficiently increase their premiums in the burnt areas. The government (or the insurers) cited two reasons: there was a rule that the annual increase should be no more than 7%, and that if they want to make an exception then the insurers must increase the premiums for all the insured areas instead of setting the price by risk. As a result, the insurers stopped insurance renewal for about 60% of the burnt properties. I assume the intention is to protect the insured or to ensure certain equity, hence the use of the term "ideology". FWIW, it thought it was a neutral term, implying that it's a strongly held fundamental belief.
California's insurance policies are more strange, due to proposition 103, passed in 1988.
It creates a condition where the state can prohibit insurers from selling to residents, if it doesn't like their prices, which has recently lead to a lot of insurers no longer selling in the state, as construction prices in the state have risen significantly faster than inflation, leading to insurance premiums that the state doesn't like.
Residents who no longer have any insurers available can buy insurance from the state, but its far more expensive than the plans it rejected from private insurers.
> There's no universally-accepted "ideology of California." It's a big state with a huge, diverse population.
Population is diverse and large, yes, but the state government (including the insurance commissioner) is radically biased left/progressive and has been for decades.
Climate change is gonna be really expensive. Some people have tried to point this out.
The problem is liability, to an extent; if you imagine a perfect market system, then maybe it would fix climate change; the parties responsible would be on the hook to pay for their externalities, so would be incentivised to stop producing them. In the real world, ah, not so much, though I do wonder if we'll see insurers/reinsurers attempting to sue big CO2 emitters in the near future.
"Pakistan floods: One third of country is under water - minister"
>don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires
Fireproof concrete bunkers would be worse for insurance because when the firestorm blows through and shatters the 7-centimeter windows slits your fireproof design calls for and ignites the interior you have to demolish steel reinforced concrete with machinery instead of knocking down wood with a sledgehammer and muscles.
A Caterpillar D9 is more expensive per day than a migrant laborer.
There are so many images of concrete buildings being burned out that if I search "california fires" the 9th image is of a steel-reinforced concrete building has ~10 meter fire jets blowing out one of its windows.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in here is the ornamental planting of non-native plants all over LA, like eucalyptus which is highly flammable, as opposed to the native coastal oak, which is not. All those iconic, non-native palm trees are fire hazards.
That's because that wasn't a material effect in this situation. It was hurricane force winds blowing over native shrubs and scrub land. It wasn't forests of eucalyptus that caused this. California has a decades long effort to restore native plants in areas. Eucalyptus groves are being torn out. The problem is that the native shrubs and grass are pretty flammable. They evolved to burn and regrow. They aren't resistant.
For sure, they're not fireproof of course, but they do survive and seem to be more resistant than non-native species [1].
And, like all things, of course there are many interdependent pieces in play, like those hurricane force winds, but oak trees don't burn the same as a palm [2]. I just keep seeing that viral video of a firefighter trying to put out a palm while a guy escaped his house on a bike -- it was shedding embers like crazy. [3]
[1] pdf warning: https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr21...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/elderly-couple-battles-flames-la-f...
[3] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/pali...
It’s possible that solve the hurricane problems with proper building regulations and lower the risk of huge wildfires with controlled burning. But the US as always prefers to pretend that there’s nothing to be done when other parts of the world has figured it out.
We have cyclones here similar to the hurricanes in the US and usually it just blows over some trees maybe causes a power outage. The absolute worst I have experienced was 3 days without power. I have never seen a house destroyed by a cyclone here.
As for wildfires, they do unfortunately claim a few houses most years.