End of a Climate Delusion – WSJ

Californians are stuck adapting in the ways left open to them. Since 2017, half a million have fled Los Angeles County.

Two social technologies might help but the state has been intent on denying itself their advantages. One is a functioning insurance market. If you can t afford the insurance, you can t afford the house. Get ready, instead, for a torrent of federal and state money to help residents, some of them wealthy, rebuild in high-risk fire zones.

The other is a functioning market in water. Five gallons to produce a walnut probably isn t tenable under any realistic system of water pricing. If water were properly valued, municipalities would also rapidly discover the logic of building aquifers to capture seasonal runoff. A thousand things would change if water were priced to flow to its most highly valued uses.

Here s another concept: Climate change can exist and yet be an insignificant variable. In Southern California s Mediterranean climate, anytime 100-mile-an-hour winds start blowing embers toward densely packed housing developments, a conflagration is certain. The only answer then is to have the manpower and resources ready to put fires out as quickly as they start.

I ve written repeatedly about climate and energy policies in the Western world being a colossal example of sophisticated state failure, in which attempts to address complex problems yield only a succession of boondoggles and economic crises. If California voters don t wise up now, they never will.

via www.wsj.com

Holman Jenkins. RTWT.