Chamath: California's wildfire failure is "a level of incompetence bordering on criminal negligence"
01:34 Share

There's a level of incompetence bordering on criminal negligence here that we need to get to the bottom of.

Remember that crazy apocalyptic video of that exact same part of Southern California burning to the ground? That was six years ago. This is not like it was a distant memory from 100 years ago. This idea that we were just lollygagging around and got caught off guard by 100 mile an hour winds to me is completely not an acceptable answer. There's this California Environmental Quality Act and a whole bunch of these other regulatory policies that limited the ability of local governments

and fire management to clear dead trees and vegetation. Multiple bills, AB 2330, AB 1951, AB 2639, that would have exempted these wildfire prevention projects from CEQA and other permitting issues, all rejected

by the Democrat-controlled legislator, or worse, vetoed by Governor Newsom. I think that that's a really big deal. I'm just a little bit at a loss to explain these two bodies of data. Everybody can see that these events are happening. All the bills that are meant to prevent this are blocked or vetoed. This is the ultimate expression of

negligence and incompetence. How much money did the government of California spend, poorly as it turns out, on homelessness? It was about $21 billion, and illegal immigrants. I don't know what the final number is there, but I suspect in the tens of billions. If you reappropriated those dollars to these kinds of protective mechanisms in these areas, what would the outcome have been? It's hard for me to believe it would have been as bad as it is right now.