Deep Dive
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This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. I thought it would be good to revisit the original intent of this show. In 2017, when we started, we wanted to create a forum to dive into and discuss the motivations and the research that my colleagues do across the campus in science, technology, engineering, medicine, and other topics.
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What happens in these big fires is embers are flying through the air like a snowstorm on fire. They hit a vertical surface and they fall down to the base of that surface. That vertical surface is the wall of your house. They ignite whatever's at the base and then that stuff burns your house down.
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Today, Michael Wara will tell us that wildfires are going to be with us for a while. They're going to get worse. But science, new policies, and better communication offer a path to better safety and less destruction. It's the future of wildfires. Before we get started, a reminder to tell friends, neighbors, and colleagues all about the future of everything. We want to grow the show, and word of mouth is the best way to do it.
Well, we've all seen what wildfires can do. In the early parts of 2025, there was this terribly devastating fire in Los Angeles, destroying lots of the Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and other areas. But that wasn't the first. There had been a history of fires throughout California. There was a terrible fire in Napa Valley in 2017, and we've just been hearing more and more about wildfires.
What's going on? Well, it turns out that there is a relationship between small changes in temperature and large changes in wildfire risk. In addition, it's straining the insurance industry. It's straining homeowners who want to be safe but don't have the knowledge or the resources to make things more safe. And it's straining communities that are trying to make difficult decisions about how to spend their money to protect from wildfire while also addressing all the other needs of the community.
Well, Michael Wara is a professor of law at Stanford University and an expert on wildfire, environmental science, climate, insurance, and all the issues that roll up in a discussion of wildfires. He's going to tell us that there is a big problem, but there are things, levers, that we can press and turn in order to improve the situation. Michael, how did you arrive at wildfires as a major focus of your work in law and the environment?
Well, for about 20 years, I've been working on clean energy policy with a real focus in California. And about 10 years ago, people may remember that electric utilities started burning communities down, not intentionally, but a little too frequently for comfort. And I was one of the people that immediately sort of, or maybe early recognized that
this was a real threat to everything that we wanted to accomplish on climate in the state. And so started to get involved from that perspective. And the more you learn about it, the more you learn about wildfire, it's like an old sweater. You start pulling on it and it just comes apart and you can't really limit your, or I guess you could, but I don't think it's the solutions. The real solutions are not limited to a single silo of thinking. And so, um,
Started to spread out from there. It was on a wildfire commission that the state created back in 19 to try to solve some of the utility issues. But I came out of that even more concerned for the state. The more I learned about it, the more worried I've gotten. And the more I think that we need a kind of whole of society solution to this problem. Yeah.
So it's funny. I'm glad you said that because one of the things that comes out in your writings is, of course, that this is multifactorial. And I would love to get to the utility companies, the insurance companies. But one of the things that a little bit surprised me was how central the community is, the community that's at risk of being destroyed. And it's all on our minds, not only because of what happened 10 years ago, but what happened several months ago in Los Angeles is.
So tell me about that community focus. And is that something that is fully appreciated? Is it activated at the level you would like to see? And what are the opportunities there? I know that that's too many questions. So take whichever one of them you like. That is the challenge. If this were easy to do politically and socially, we would have solved the problem because there's been wildfire risk forever. Right. I'm old enough to remember the 91.
Oakland Hills fire. One of my closest colleagues was a child and his family lost their home in that fire. And they moved to the South Bay from the East Bay as a result. So this is not new. What's changing is how often it happens, right? You know, we've gone from, you know, actually, I remember talking to the senior insurance executives after 2017, which was, you know, the Napa Sonoma fires and bad fires in Southern California that year too.
And they said, well, you know, this happens once every 30 years, nothing to get too upset about, right? We're going to lose a lot of money and this time, and then maybe we'll be fine for another 30 years, but that's not what has happened. And, um,
That means we need to think about the problem in a different way and address it with much greater urgency. And the real solutions are ones that start at the community level. They start at the house level. Like, how do you garden? What does your garden look like? What are the responsibilities that you have to maintain a safe home and garden and
And what are the responsibilities of your neighbors? And how do we all agree on a different arrangement so that we can all be safe? And I think that is the fundamental challenge. And if it were easy, then we all would have done it a long time ago because we do easy things. But it's not easy. And so we're struggling.
Do communities generally embrace this challenge? Are people still in denial or thinking this is the state's problem, this is the federal problem, this is not our problem? Or have you seen that the communities, especially those at risk, and it's not that hard. I mean, sometimes there's a surprise fire, but in general, when there's a fire and you look at it, you know, you see wind situations, you see fuel situations where it looks like it probably could have been predicted. Are those communities in denial or do you see them activating?
I think we're at a hinge point right now. But I would say we have done a lot of work. You look at the political response of the state over the last decade, mostly it has been to spend money on utilities, to stop utilities from starting fires. We've done okay on that. It's not perfect. We're hitting the limits of that strategy.
And then we spent a lot of money as a state doing things outside of communities, right? Like burning, trying to do more prescribed fire to preserve landscapes, trying to, to the extent we're doing community stuff, it's like at the edge, right? Can we have a fuel break at the edge? Not can we do things...
Every house by house so that we don't have what happened in Altadena or Pacific Palisades play out. And I'll tell you, we knew what to do in 2017. Like if you went and talked to the insurance industry, if you went and like as soon as I started to sort of pull up the open the book on this, it was clear that there was a lot of science involved.
but not a lot of willingness to implement. And it reminds me a lot of, you know, the speed limit on the highway is 65 miles an hour, but where I live, everybody drives 80. And it's not as if the CHP really have authority to pull over people if they're going 66 miles an hour, right? They might pull you over if you're going 75, but you have to be a little careful if you're going faster than 75.
but it's there's not a cult there's not a political culture that supports the
the entities in government that might kind of enforce rules, enforcing the rules. If they try, they get fired. Yep. Okay. So let's, you said something, you said many things very interesting, but one of the things you said is that the science, even in 2017 was clear about like what we could or slash need to do. So can, could you re quickly review for me? What are the things that are kind of scientifically no brainers, but that are not happening? So, um,
We need we learned in some fires in California in the early 2000s that we needed a building code that would prevent houses from catching on fire reduce the chances of ignition of houses we implemented that in 2008 and that building code is very effective and
The problem is it's California. We have a housing crisis. We don't build a lot of houses. We have a lot of old houses. Well, they're not that old, but we have older homes mostly. And we build, you know, a hundred thousand new homes a year. We got 12 million existing homes. So you do the math on that and, and, and you realize pretty quickly that if we're not doing things to the existing homes, it's not going to solve the problem. It's legacy risk that dominates. And, and, you know, that's, that's reasonable in the sense that
risk is changing very fast because of climate change. It's one of the impacts from climate change that's changing the fastest and it's changing much faster than temperature. And so it's understandable like we built an environment we created communities and infrastructure when the risks were different. Now they have changed and
And we have to adjust. And the challenge is that fire is pushing us to adjust faster than society is normally prone to do. Yeah.
What about things like, so you mentioned the utilities. Should they be burying more lines? Does that work? Is that part of the science or is that just like an urban myth? Utilities have done a lot over the last decade. Like I sleep much better on a September, a windy, warm September evening than I did in 2018. Things are much safer. But there are limits to what utilities can do. And the limits really revolve around cost.
In theory, we could underground everything. There are certain places with very new electric systems where, you know, and actually in California today, if you build a new master plan community, the electric system is undergrounded. That's been true since about the mid 1990s. But again, we have all these older communities. I live in a place where Mill Valley, where the streets were laid out in the 20s and 30s and the electric system was built around that time. And it's kind of maintained in place and
Undergrounding that electric system is incredibly expensive, more expensive than we can afford as a state. And it also takes a long time. And in the meantime, fires are happening, right? So there's a kind of how fast can we change and then what does it cost? And we have moved, we have been spending...
Six, seven billion dollars a year making the electric system safer for the last since 2017, really. And that has caused California's electricity rates to skyrocket to the point where affordability has become the central challenge for electricity. And there's a lot of people in California that can afford their electric rates. Twenty five percent of I don't want to overstate. I think it's 20 percent of California.
customers, low-income customers in PG&E's service territory are in serious bill arrearage. So like a fifth of the low-income population can't pay their electricity bill. Okay, so that's huge because that then trickles down to limited resources for the electric company. They get stressed out in many senses of the word. And they're only allowed to charge so much, right? So if they want to raise the rates, they have to ask permission. And at this point, there is not permission because of these effects. And so...
And I think it's, you know, sort of logically you think like, okay, the first few ignitions we avoid, those are going to be inexpensive. There's some stupid stuff that we were doing. We've got to stop doing the stupid stuff. And then we're going to get a little more clever and we're going to start doing the utilities in California and do some pretty high tech things to avoid ignitions at this point. Those things reduce the reliability of the system. So like the electric system switches off really quickly now. Tree brushes it.
And that's good. That means, you know, so in L.A., it's likely that one of the fires was caused by the electric system. But the kind of fire that we used to cause in the electric system is almost extinct, right? It used to be that the wires near your house would start fires, the distribution system.
We had none of those fires in LA. Last two years, PG&E has caused no major fires from its distribution system. So we appear to have solved that problem or are getting close to solving it. And now we have this other challenge, which is the transmission system, which is maybe what caused the fire in Altadena.
Very, very interesting. Going back to the point about it's too expensive to bury things, are there good algorithms, so to speak, for identifying the highest risk areas and saying, okay, if we only can spend this much, here's the communities that have the highest risk? Is that something that's happening? Yeah, that is what's happening. And so we're burying, you know, there's sort of like a kind of how much can we afford to bury? And then let's risk target that.
All that work. And that is something the utilities have been forced to do by their regulators. And they're at first it was they weren't so good at it, but they've gotten a lot better at it. And so that is the kind of thing that's happening in the electric system. By contrast, right, when we go back to, you know, what are the other things we're doing? There's not risk targeting happening across the state very much and not nearly the same level of sophistication.
On the, you know, where do we invest in making community safer? Like, should we go after the communities that are the highest risk and spend a bunch of state money to build fuel breaks around them? Or should we spend, should we ask the homeowners because they're in these really high risk areas to do different things? That is not something we've done.
So that leads to questions about the insurance industries. You've mentioned them already and you've mentioned them as actually knowing quite a bit of things. Like they've studied this. They are in it all the way up to their necks. What is the situation with insurance? Those of us in California know that rates in certain areas are just going –
exponential. In some cases, people understand it. In fact, they say, I understand why my rates are so high. This is a risky area. But how are the insurance companies either contributing to the problem and or the solutions? Yeah. So I think insurance can be a signal, not a cost of the solution, right? It's going to tell you, insurance is a way for people to get information about where there is risk. But the reality is, politically,
We're not going to let insurers charge enough to cause people to change their behavior. I suspect we won't. And there's a lot of history to suggest that that's true from the Southeast and the experience with hurricanes in the Southeast.
The real estate market falls apart long before insurers are allowed to charge enough to fully reflect the risk. And therefore, the state governments step in to stop the real estate market from falling apart. Because if you can't sell property, governors don't have jobs anymore. Right. So...
So the insurance industry for a long time has been investing in modeling to estimate their risk, like not a shock, right? They're the people ultimately that hold the bag when bad things happen. And so they want to know how much bag are they holding and how much did they charge for holding it. And those models, you know, those models, we were using them. I used them.
to develop this kind of special insurance policy for the electric utilities called the California wildfire fund back in 2019. And you know, what jumped out of that, that modeling work Pacific Palisades, that was the single largest financial exposure. Um, the, the biggest risk for exactly this kind of fire, the kind of fire where, um,
It happens. It's basically over in a single night. And recognize there are fires, there are wildfires that happen in California that burn for months. You may remember the Dixie Fire, the Caldor Fire from a few years ago, or the Lightning Complex fires in 2020 when we were all locked down. That was just horrendous. Those are like forest fires. Yeah.
The problem we have in California, the big problem we have in California, forest fires are a big problem. Don't get me wrong. Like if you want to go backpacking in the high Sierra and you care about walking in trees instead of a brush field, you should care about that. And also your first comments were about air quality and that is huge volumes of pollution. Right. And I think all of us who do recreate in the Sierra have experienced the
The orange days. Being destroyed, right? Like you can't go on your backpacking trip because the air quality is so terrible, you'll have a heart attack or get asthma. And so that's one problem. But there's another problem. And the other problem that the insurance industry really cares about is what happened in LA, which is in January, which is...
I think it's not – you would call it a wildfire, but in some ways that like misrepresents what's going on. It's houses burning down, not trees. And like those fires, if you go to Altadena or Pacific Palisades, if you've been – if you're familiar with the area, you'll know that the ignition points of those fires were in the wildlands.
But they were brush fires for about 10 minutes and then maybe 10, 20 houses were ignited. And at that point, it's houses igniting houses. The fuel that's burning is houses and gardens, not wild lands. And
So that's more akin to like what used to happen in the 19th century, like the Great Chicago Fire in 1870. Yeah, I was thinking about these in San Francisco after the earthquake. Yes, exactly. 1906. Right. My great-grandmothers had to live in Golgate Park after that one. And we figured out a way to solve those problems. We don't have those kinds of fires anymore because the urban environment has been engineered not to burn.
And that is an important indicator of like the kinds of things we need to be thinking about. Not necessarily fuel breaks, although those are not unimportant, right? If you want to prevent the translation of a wildland fire into an urban fire, one way would be like have a moat around the community. That's kind of what a fuel break is. Yeah. But-
Those moats are going to be imperfect for reasons that have to do with wind speed, basically. They're only as good as the wind speed. And so the other solution is vaccinate the houses.
Right. Make sure that the houses, you know, it's and it is like vaccination or it's like wearing a seatbelt in your car. Right. It makes you a lot safer. Doesn't mean you won't necessarily die. If you hit a wall going 80 miles an hour, you're still going to die with your seatbelt on. Yeah. You know, I'm really struck by this reference to the old time cities and how when they rebuilt Chicago, when they rebuilt San Francisco, they looked they were a lot more safe. But now it occurs to me that.
grown up suburbia looks more like San Francisco and Chicago before the fires than it looks like them now. And so there's this weird way in which suburbia has become the next set of obvious fires. Another way to look at it is, you know, we worry a lot about trees burning. Trees are made out of wood, right? And they're alive. So they're wood with a lot of water inside. That's called sap, you know? But the thing that's really dangerous is if you have dead trees burning,
or dead fuel on the forest floor. What are houses? Houses are dead fuel with some plastic layered on top. And so that is a very dangerous combination of things given climate change, given the fact that the atmosphere is getting drier much faster than it's warming. And then we have these wind events where we've got really dry, what the firefighters call dead fuel,
all packed together. And that was Pacific Palisades and Altadena in a nutshell. And so we need to figure out how do we engineer that situation
in a way that is affordable, right? Where we're not asking people somehow come up with an extra 200, $300,000 to fix your house, house by house times 12 million houses in California, or maybe it's just two or 3 million in the high risk areas, but still. - Big numbers. - Especially for people that can barely afford the houses. - This is the Future of Everything with Russ Altman. We'll have more with Michael Wara next.
Welcome back to the Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Michael Wara from Stanford University. In the last segment, we started our discussion on the real problems that wildfires are causing, some of their causes, and what's being done.
In this section, we're going to talk about three things. We're going to talk about climate change as the underlying cause for lots of these problems. We'll talk about opportunities for better policies and regulations and enforcement. And we'll talk about new ways to communicate both the risk and the opportunities for addressing that risk. I wanted to kind of go right to a big issue, which is kind of underlying all of this. And you made a reference to it, which is climate change. How is climate change affecting
Changing your world as you study these fires. So the climate's a little warmer than it used to be. It's going to get, that's going to continue, unfortunately, but that's just life in the big world, right? We're not doing the things we need to do to make that stop.
What's interesting and scary about fire is that the things that drive these large destructive fires are essentially the square of the temperature change. The key aspect of the environment that is changing is how thirsty the atmosphere is, how much water vapor the atmosphere can hold relative to what it is holding. That is a square of the temperature change.
And so that explains so much of what is going on in the Western United States and really all over the world, Australia, Portugal, Greece, Chile, you name it. I've always wondered about that because I've always thought, thank you for telling me this. I've always thought, how could a few degrees of difference that, yes, I'm a little bit warmer, but...
Yet I'm seeing these fires like are going exponential. And what you're basically telling me is it's at least quadratic in its growth, in its relationship. The dead fuel, the water evaporates out of the dead fuel faster out of houses. And plants are working harder to stay hydrated. And so they're sucking water out of the ground more. And so that then reinforces the whole pattern. And what we get is incredibly low fuel moisture, right?
And that, you know, everybody who's made a campfire or just a fire in their fireplace knows wet wood, a lot harder to burn. Dry wood, easy to burn. And that's what's happening.
So climate change has a direct, it's actually an equation of its relationship to the fire risk. Yes. And the thing to realize about this is we kind of know how the temperature is going to change over the next decade. And therefore, we can extrapolate to how much thirstier the atmosphere will be. And what that tells you is that when you do that is by the mid 2030s,
The worst fire seasons we have ever experienced today are going to be average. So this is a this is a treadmill that is rapidly speeding up. And we observe that in the world. Ask any firefighter. Right. They'll tell you if they've been working for a couple of decades, the beginning of their career was a completely different experience from the current moment. And the new guys are going to say the same thing.
Yes. So tell me about – OK. So you've painted a very clear picture and some of the levers we have are in regulation and new policies. How is that going? Well, I think it was not going great honestly until January and then in January, Newsom took a step that he has been very reluctant to do. This is the governor of California. Governor of California. Yeah.
ordered the Board of Forestry to finalize a regulation that they had been sitting on for several years. It was supposed to be finalized under statute January 1st of 2023 that basically requires people to change their garden. It has a name which is much less clear than that. It's called the Zone Zero Regulation.
But it basically says don't have stuff that can burn right next to your house within five feet of your house. That's a big deal if you think about it because we have all kinds of stuff that can burn right next to our house as a matter of course, namely bushes, right? Like gardens. People put mulch on the ground right up to their house. They have wooden furniture. They have – and this is a big one. They have attached wood fences. Like where I live, if you don't have a fence –
The deer are going to come in your backyard and just eat it like a bunch of locusts. So you got to have something. And a lot of that stuff that's right next to the house is wood. What happens in these big fires is embers are flying through the air like a snowstorm on fire. They hit a vertical surface and they fall down to the base of that surface. That vertical surface is the wall of your house. They ignite whatever's at the base. And then that stuff burns your house down.
That is an extremely effective description of how fire spreads. So thank you. Yikes. And we have tons of – we have like –
Evidence from wind tunnels where we build houses in wind tunnels and burn them down. We have all of the tens of thousands of structures we've lost over the last decade that proves out this theory of the case. Down to field evaluation of what happened in Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Video evidence from within those fires so we can watch it happen.
Is this going to be new buildings or is there a chance it'll be some retroactive regulations? This regulation is going to apply immediately at the end of the year to new build. But as I said, new build doesn't mean anything in California.
It has a three-year delay before it kicks in for existing structures. So the challenge is, how the heck is the state of California going to get everybody to drive 65 miles an hour on the highway when it comes to the safety of their garden? And I'll tell you, if you know defensible space code today and you drive around California, you will notice that it is not enforced. If you've ever had a firefighter visit your house...
and try to explain that you should comply with the defensible space code. It's not like a cop pulling you over. It's more like an educational, friendly conversation because the firefighter wants to be your friend. Right. My, my brother-in-law used to be a, is a firefighter. And he always said the great thing about being a firefighter in contrast to being a cop is
Is that the firefighters can eat the food that people drop off at the fire station because people like them. And they like the firefighters that they don't want to be the bad guy. And so, you know, I think regulations are great. We are moving forward on that. It is what the insurance industry says we need is what the science says we need.
But there's a big difference between what's on paper and what's in the world. Just out of curiosity, is this going to put wooden decks at risk if you have a deck outside your house? Not at present. You're getting really close to people's heart, right? Garden and deck. Garden and deck. Yeah. This is the thing, right? So the challenge is – and I think part of the problem here is firefighters, honestly. They are the communicators on this and they –
They're war fighters. They are firefighters. They are warriors. And they approach this whole conversation. If you think about the language, right, they'll tell you, you need to harden your home to Ember attack by preparing zone zero. To me, that sounds like I'm in Ukraine on the front lines.
And like, I have to get ready for the Russians to come take my town. Is that effective? Well, no, that's not how I want to think about my house. My house is a place to your point, Russ, where I'm out on my deck, having a mojito with my friends on a Friday evening, looking at the flowers. Yeah. And, and maybe my kids are growing up playing next to my house, you know, whatever in the dirt. And, and,
So when a firefighter comes with that kind of approach in language and then you should – the visuals are not attractive and they are not appealing to people who have stretched to the maximum extent to be able to afford a mortgage. And they're thinking about this also as their most valuable asset. A firefighter says, hey, you need to rip out your yard and just pour gravel around your house. Right. That's not going to work. And so –
So we need new communication methods and new communication messages. And messengers. Okay. So what's your vision? I think the opportunity here is to really capitalize on the tragedy that has just happened.
A lot of very famous, very affluent people have just lost their homes. They are going to hire the best architects, the best landscape architects to rebuild. You know, Pacific Palisades will be rebuilt. Now, we could debate about the wisdom of that and manage retreat on it, but it's going to happen. And so and it's going to happen and be gorgeous.
And so I think that actually is one of the greatest opportunities. We have a high income community full of people who are connected to the media ecosystem and we need to harness that. We need to have tons at the, another thing about the firefighters, when they show you images, no people, it's like the zombie apocalypse. Right. Right. So we need to have,
famous star a with his signature cocktail in his hand talking to famous star b saying and the famous star a says you know there's just nothing we can do about this we're all just going to burn down famous star b says well actually look at my backyard and they're walking around talking about how sick how you can do things how there is agency in this because you know what i have a defensible and beautiful backyard absolutely safe beautiful valuable and
a place for your kids to play and to entertain. And also you're doing the right thing by your community. You're taking climate change seriously. Climate change is real and we take it seriously in California. So we're going to do something about it. And you know what? It doesn't have to be terrible. It doesn't have to be like this, this kind of stripped down draconian life. It can be California. I love the idea that part of the key to the future of wildfires is Hollywood. Yeah.
It's got to be. But it really is. And you just described it very clearly. And, you know, and I think that is what gives, I mean, it's the hope that we can draw out of this tragedy. Thanks to Michael Wara. That was the future of Wildfire. Thanks for tuning into this episode. Don't forget, we have more than 250 back episodes on a wide variety of topics that can keep you entertained for hours.
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